Also called: Lal Kitab palmistry · Lal Kitab hand diagram · Twelve bhavas on the palm · Hand kundali · Palm horoscope houses

Where on the hand: The whole palm, read as a birth chart: the twelve houses of the horoscope are assigned to fixed positions on the hand — the first house near the Sun mount, the second at the Jupiter mount, the third in the web between thumb and index finger, the fourth at the outer edge of the palm opposite the little finger, the fifth between the Mercury and Moon mounts, the sixth at the centre of the palm, the seventh below the Mercury mount, the eighth below the Moon mount, the ninth between the Venus and Moon mounts, the tenth below the Saturn mount, the eleventh between the Mars area and the palm, and the twelfth between the Venus mount and the palm below the life line.

What it looks like: Not a marking but an overlay — a twelve-part chart drawn mentally on the palm, so that a mark or a mount's condition can be read as a planet's condition in a house.

The Lal Kitab tradition of North Indian astrology treats the hand as a horoscope that can be read without a birth time. Each region of the palm stands for one bhāva, and its fullness, colour, lines and marks are read as the strength or affliction of that house. It is the Indian counterpart of the Chinese twelve palaces, and it is why Lal Kitab practitioners will read a hand and prescribe the same upāyas (remedies) they would prescribe from a chart.

Read with care: Sources differ over the exact house positions, and the Lal Kitab corpus itself is late (twentieth-century) and disputed among astrologers. Present it as one named school's overlay, not as classical Samudrika.