Stories of Jivavarta: Festival of the Free Hand

A long time ago, there was a village near Vanpore, the capital of Yashantika.

Like in any other village in Yashantika, all land in the village was owned by the Grahvars, the class of highborn landlords. It had been so for generations.

Not only did the Grahvars own the land, they also owned the Cetas who worked on the land. The Cetas worked on the farms, cleaned the houses, and did whatever they were told to do.

The Cetas rose early and worked till midnight. They did so every day of their lives, and when they could no longer work they were simply thrown off the land.

For the Grahvars, this was not cruelty. They believed that Sarvabhu, the God of Gods, had arranged the world this way -- the Grahvars were born to rule while the Cetas were born to serve -- and what had been decided by God could not be questioned by men.

Then came the Unification of Jivavarta, and with it a revolution.

The old religion of Tapasi was replaced by the new faith of Ajabuhi. This new faith declared that the Cetas were free.

This did not bode well for the Grahavars. Many Grahvars were killed, and several others fled. Some stayed back, only to learn the meaning of having nothing.

To commemorate their freedom, the Cetas started celebrating the Festival of the Free Hand. They gathered in the village square and told gruesome stories of how cruelly the Grahvars treated the Cetas. These stories were needed, for freedom needs stories to prove what it is all about.

Over time, the stories grew darker. The greater the need to prove one's grit, the grimmer one makes the story of the past. Children who had never seen a Grahvar estate grew up learning to hate the Grahvars. They learned to swear by the names of men, Grahavar villains and Ceta heros, who had been dead for generations. The past had become an inheritance. Inheritance is a strange thing, it can be of wealth and name, but it can also be of hatred. They learned that their forefathers had suffered, and therefore someone must continue to suffer for it.

Time passed, as it always does.

The Cetas had now grown wealthy. They had taken possession of the farms where their ancestors had worked as slaves, and had built houses on land their ancestors had been forbidden to tread.

The Grahvars were not so fortunate. Their titles were gone, their lands were gone, and their wealth was gone. Only the ruins of their prosperous past remained.

Among the ruins of one such family lived a young boy. He was timid, but there was a quiet pride inside him, the kind of pride that belongs to those who have inherited nothing beyond a name.

He lived with his family in a small hut. On the walls hung dusty portraits of his ancestors dressed in embroidered silk, staring down at him with the confidence of people who had never seen poverty.

The boy knew almost nothing about them. He did not know how many Cetas had gone hungry because of his ancestors. He did not know how many had been beaten. He did not know how many had died. He knew only that the men in those portraits had once been wealthy, and now his family had nothing.

Things took a turn when he joined the village academy. On the first day, the teacher asked the students to introduce themselves. As the boy listened to other students bragging about their ancestors, something inside him opened up.

"My ancestors' house was once filled with the riches of Jivavarta," he said, proudly.

Everybody became quiet. The boy smiled, he was enjoying the attention.

"We had diamonds as large as the Chitrantak stone!" he added.

Someone looked at him and shouted "Be quiet, you uncouth scum. Your ancestors were monsters."

"You carry their evil blood," supported another, and everybody around started jeering at him.

The boy was shocked. At first he felt ashamed, and then he felt angry. Eventually he could no longer tell the difference. He could not understand why he was getting all this hate. He ran home with his face red with anger. For many days afterwards, he stared at his ancestors' portraits and asked aloud, "If I did not commit their crimes, why am I being punished and humiliated?"

He did not go back to the academy, but the question stayed. It followed him when he worked. It followed him when he slept. It followed him whenever someone spoke of his family's name with disgust.

Something inside him had changed. His family's poverty had become an injustice. The loss of their estate became a theft of his property. The humiliation of his ancestors became his own humiliation. He was told that his family once owned land. They had forgotten to add that they also owned people. He got together with a few other young men, whose Grahvar families like his had lost everything. They talked about the injustice being done to them, and the humiliation they were facing, and they also spoke of revenge.

Later that year, when the Festival of the Free Hand was being celebrated, he stood near the village square and watched. The Cetas gathered, spoke proudly of their ancestors, and then of their bad past. The boy listened as the names of dead Grahvars, including his ancestors, were cursed and mocked.

At the center of the square stood an old Ceta leader. He had been born under Grahvar rule and carried the memories of that world inside him. With a heavy heart, he was reciting the names of the Cetas who had died before his eyes in rebellion.

Then, as if in retribution, he raised his voice and began to recite the crimes of the Grahvar boy’s ancestors. Each name felt like another knife placed upon the boy's chest. The boy heard the crowd berating him and his family, and felt the old question surface again. "Why should I be punished for what my ancestors did?"

He quietly made his way to the center of the square. As he stepped forward, the old man looked at him. For a moment, neither spoke. Then the boy bent down, picked up a handful of mud, and threw it at the old man.

The mud struck the old man, spoiling his white robes. People screamed in horror. The boy tried to explain himself, but his words disappeared amid the shouting. Someone from the crowd struck him. He fell to the ground, and another blow hit him, then another.

"Beat the monster to death!" someone shouted.

"Kill the evil Grahvar!"

The boy curled his arms around his head.

The old Ceta leader remained where he was. He looked down at the boy, and for a moment he saw not a Grahvar, but a frightened child. A child who had never owned a Ceta. A child who had never ordered a beating. A child who had inherited a name, but not the crimes attached to it.

The old man almost spoke. He almost told the crowd to stop. In the past, under Grahvar rule, he had often thought of supporting the rebellious Cetas, but had always remained silent. Now, when he had the chance to speak, he chose to remain silent once more.

The boy had fainted, and was severely injured. As he was dragged away, the old man went back to his speech honouring the Ceta rebels.

The festivities continued with renewed enthusiasm, as the Cetas celebrated their hard-won freedom. They drank and danced all night beneath the full moon so that Sarvabhu could see that they were not afraid of him.

Sayings of Jivavarta

We inherit more than wealth and names. Sometimes, we inherit hatred.

Lexicon of Jivavarta

The Festival of the Free Hand: A sociological concept in which something that once symbolized the fight against hatred and injustice, over time, becomes a vehicle for inherited hatred and a new form of injustice.

Top 5 concepts that capture the core of the story

1. Collective Memory (Sociology)

The Concept: Societies reconstruct the past through shared narratives, rituals, and interpretations rather than preserving history as a neutral record.
The Fit: The Festival begins as remembrance of genuine oppression, but repeated retelling transforms historical suffering into an inherited narrative of hatred. The past becomes a living social identity.

2. Collective Guilt / Inherited Guilt (Philosophy / Ethics)

The Concept: The philosophical question of whether moral responsibility for past wrongdoing can legitimately be attributed to people who did not commit it.
The Fit: This is the story's central moral question: the boy inherits a name, but does he inherit his ancestors' guilt?The crowd answers yes; the story forces us to examine that assumption.

3. Social Identity Theory (Psychology / Sociology)

The Concept: People partly define themselves through group membership, creating distinctions between “us” and “them.”
The Fit: “Ceta” and “Grahvar” survive beyond the original social order as inherited identities. The boy is treated not as an individual but as a representative of the Grahvar group.

4. Psychological Essentialism (Psychology)

The Concept: The tendency to perceive categories as possessing an underlying, intrinsic essence shared by their members.
The Fit: “You carry their evil blood” is the story's clearest expression of essentialism. Moral character is imagined as something transmitted through ancestry, turning historical identity into presumed personal nature.

5. Moral Disengagement (Psychology)

The Concept: Mechanisms through which people justify harmful behavior by reframing it as acceptable, necessary, or morally deserved.
The Fit: Calling the boy a “monster” and an “evil Grahvar” changes the crowd's perception of what it is doing. They are no longer beating a frightened child; in their moral narrative, they are punishing evil.


Shon Mehta is an author and philosopher, creator of the Jivavarta Universe—a grounded sociopolitical world exploring human resilience, social dynamics, and moral philosophy through systems thinking. Her novels (The Timingila, Lair of the Monster), poems, aphorisms, parables, and stories are used in academic curricula internationally and featured by Oxford University Press.