A different, but equally common, type of welcome is the stylised frontal representation of a young and attractive women with her hands pressed together in greeting. By her dress and heavy jewellery, the woman can be construed as an auspicious suhagin (married woman), and her gesture is marked as 'traditional' and as an expression of Indian 'culture' by its Sanskritic title, 'svagatam' (welcome). This is a favourite icon of the Indian hospitality industry.It suggests that India has developed the arts of hospitality to a very high degree of excellence and, additionally, that this tradition of hospitality reposes in its women, known everywhere for their beauty and grace.

The appearance of restrained decorum in this print is somewhat compromised, however, by a single detail, namely, that the woman wears no blouse. This would be an anomaly for the middle-class woman in real life, though it is typical of the costume of poor, lower caste and tribal women in many regions of India, these women being now 'othered' and 'sexualized' for the prurient middle-class gaze. On the other hand, it is also the case that stitched garments were formerly not worn by high-caste women on occasions requiring absolute ritual purity – worship or the preparation of food. It is hard to know which of these contrary meanings is implicated in this representation, orwhether the two should be taken together to construct the ritually pure, freshly bathed woman as an object of desire. More likely, however, the absence of the blouse is consistent with the absence of skin texture and body contours in this very uni-dimensional representation,indicating the repression, not the exaggeration, of sensuality. Svagatam is decorum itself!

Very often, the 'svagatam' motif is synecdochically attenuated to just a pair of decorated hands pressed together in greeting; indeed, this is one of the commonest icons of everyday life. And it seems that the pair of hands can itself be abbreviated to just a single hand -- a woman's hand obviously -- and still carry the same meaning. In the instance here, a photographic poster of a women’s hand, auspiciously decorated with bangles and holding a pink rose is adequate to convey the 'traditional' Indian (double-handed) greeting, svagatam.

The intersection of calendar art with other contemporary media – photography and cinema – is conspicuous in the glamorous portrait of cinestar Madhuri Dixit, holding a flower filled platter and lighted lamp, signifying, as the legend says in bold letters, 'Welcome'. Indian viewers will recognise the gorgeous sequin-encrusted costume as that worn by Madhuri in a sequence from the blockbuster romantic movie of 1994-95, 'Hum Aapke Hain Koun!', in which she had played the lead role. Along with the young girls and married women of the family, she was radiantly decked out to welcome her sister's bridegroom and his party arriving for the wedding ceremony. However, as a sideshow to this main event, the young women were preparing to play a number of pranks on the groom and his younger kinsmen, especially the groom's younger brother for whom Madhuri had developed a sneaking fancy. Thus, beneath the innocence of her conventional ritual gesture of welcome is a hint at the ribald folk rituals of reversal and transgression which, according to some anthropologists, highlight the erotic side of marriage and the complexities of the newly established relations with in-laws.

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