Malavya is one of the five Pancha Mahapurusha yogas, the great-person combinations of jyotisha, and it is the yoga of Venus. It forms when Venus occupies its own sign, Taurus or Libra, or its sign of exaltation, Pisces, while standing in a kendra, an angular house from the ascendant. The tradition reads Malavya as conferring the Venusian virtues in strength: beauty, charm, artistic and sensual refinement, comfort and wealth, and a graceful, attractive presence, giving a person of the refined and fortunate type. These are the interpretive conventions of the tradition; the yoga is a defined placement of Venus in dignity and angularity, one of the five combinations held together to mark an exceptional nativity when the planet involved is strong and free of affliction.
Venus is exalted in Pisces, the sign Jupiter rules, so a Malavya native typically carries Venus in a foreign but friendly sign rather than in the mixed dignity Mercury shows in Bhadra; classical commentators read the placement as unusually smooth, Venus finding no resistance from the sign's own lord. The reckoning question that runs through all five recurs here too: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra states the condition from the ascendant, while Mantreswara's sixteenth century Phaladeepika permits the same yoga to be judged from the Moon, and treats the combination of both, Venus angular from ascendant and Moon together, as a stronger and rarer form of the placement. Later digests such as the Saravali add specific descriptions of bearing, complexion and temperament for the Malavya native beyond the general artistic and refined character given above.
Sources Brihat Parashara Hora ShastraSage Parashara (attributed) with SaravaliKalyanavarma