Arudha Lagna
The Jaimini “image” or reflection of each bhava — how the house presents to the world. Arudha Lagna (AL) is the public-facing identity; Darapada (A7) is the spouse-image.
Birth details
Image versus reality
Arudha pada is a Jaimini concept that derives, for each bhava, a “mirror” rashi — the way that house presents to the outside world. The computation: count the distance (in signs) from the bhava to its lord, then project the same distance from the lord. Two classical exceptions: the resulting rashi cannot be the bhava itself, and it cannot be 7th from the bhava — in either case, the next-best rashi (10th from the disallowed result) is taken.
Arudha Lagna (AL) — the arudha of bhava 1 — is the most-studied. It describes the social face: how others see you, the public image you project, the persona that walks into a room before the inner self does. Where the natal lagna describes who you are, AL describes who the world thinks you are.
Darapada (A7) — the arudha of the 7th house — describes the spouse as image. The 7th itself describes the actual partnership; Darapada describes how the partnership presents publicly and what kind of partner the native is perceived as having. The two are often consonant but can diverge sharply in charts where the 7th and Darapada lords are dissimilar.
The other ten Arudha padas read analogously per bhava (A2 wealth-image, A4 home-image, A10 career-image, etc.). Modern Jaimini practice (Sanjay Rath) treats the AL as the operational lagna for material-life prediction, alongside the natal lagna for inner-life prediction.