Intermediate between the religious and the everyday is the zone of the mythological -- an important conceptual space, since the colonial period, for the recovery of a sense of national identity. Women-focused legends and stories of love and sacrifice were central to this construction, which was given visual embodiment through the rediscovered arts of ancient India.Several of the current crop of 'Welcome' calendars play on this idea of the classical, if only, thereby, to evade the censor.The first shows a sinuous woman in a notionally classical dance costume, standing on a lotus and making an offering of flower petals. Here there is reference not only to the idea of the classical and to the idiom of dance, now bowdlerized in popular cinema, but back to the sacred --for the goddess Lakshmi is conventionally depicted as seated or standing on a flowering lotus. The rising sun behind her (rising, rather than setting, seems a more plausible reading), is both a decorative embellishment, the sign of a new beginning, a divinising halo, and an evocation of the daily salute to the rising sun, surya namaskar.

Two other 'Welcome' calendars invoke the ambience of the classical in an image most frequently found in daily life as an adornment of the humble auto-rickshaw. They show a single 'celestial nymph' (the rather quaint Orientalist rendering of the term apsara), or a pair of these mythical damsels, scantily dressed in artfully arranged strips of cloth and an abundance of jewels, kneeling and offering flowers in a gesture – presumably – of reverential welcome. Such costumes, which are also abbreviated versions of the present-day costume of classical dance, have been domesticated in the Indian film industry as appropriate to the fantasy realm of song-dance items, and to the tribal 'other' woman. Interestingly, the kneeling posture is not at all typical of the body language of everyday life (except, arguably, as a stage on the way to full prostration), though it manages nonetheless to convey a generalized Indo-European classical ambience, at once ritualistic and courtly.

There is another small detail of the apsara calendars that might be noted. One of them (on the right here) is signed by V.V. Sapar, a well-known artist of the old-established firm of Sapar Brothers. The other, which is almost identical in conception and execution, is unsigned. Possibly it is also the work of V.V. Sapar, but copying, plagiarism, and the recycling of images in various ways are typical of the calendar art industry, subverting bourgeois notions of authorship and the legal commercial protection of copyright. Artists' signatures may be eliminated (deliberately or otherwise) in the course of the printing process, and copies specifically commissioned by market-savvy publishers are usually, for obvious reasons, left unsigned. Backdrops are routinely recycled, and can frame an icon of the goddess Saraswati, a 'scene' from classical mythology, or a scantily-clad pin-up 'bathing beauty' -- all with equal plausibility.

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