SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TITLE “THE FREE RADIO”

By Salman Rushdie

"The Free Radio" by Salman Rushdie is a story about the sterilisation campaign launched by the
Indian government during one of the darkest phases in Indira Gandhi's regime - National
Emergency. It is a story about a young man named Ramani, who voluntarily got deprived of his
"manhood." He was a naive rickshaw puller who got married to a woman who was a thief's widow.
The free radio was an incentive awarded to all the men who underwent sterilisation surgery or
vasectomy.
The narrator of the story is a retired school teacher who was friends with Ramani's deceased
father and is "concerned" about the well-being of Ramani. The pain of the story is articulated by
the retired schoolmaster through comments such as "his crime against his own body", "the thief's
widow has turned him into a thief of a stupid and terrible kind." This story acts as a window to the
past and explains how the government adopted the practice of "nasbandi" or vasectomy to control
the raging population of the Golden Bird. The ruling class ignored the lower-class people and
survived on violence, hypocrisy and trickery.
The narrator of the story is clearly disappointed at the fact that Ramani married a thief's widow
who was ten years older than him. The widow's husband died, leaving behind not a single penny,
but five children. The woman trapped Ramani in her spell because she knew he could feed her
family and help them survive. It was difficult for Ramani to get out of the web laid by the woman
as he was an innocent, naive and empty-headed person. He had voluntarily gone to subject himself
to a humiliation that was being forced upon the other men who were taken to a big white caravan
to carry out the procedure of vasectomy. He justified himself while being asked by the narrator by
saying that his wife does not want any children, and it is also in the “national interest.”
The free radio acts as compensation for the act of robbing oneself. Ramani thought that the Health
Department would gift him a transistor radio for undergoing the surgery. Little did he know that
the scheme had been abandoned a decade ago. The free radio acted as a medium of escape for
Ramani and paved the way for his imagination. The free radio became a symbol of reward for
Ramani. Rather than thinking about his loss of nurturing lives, he just wanted his fictional reward
in the form of a radio. We see Ramani mimicking holding the radio in one hand and cupping his
ears. Ramani did not only get deprived of his manhood, but his sanity was also at his sake since he
deceived himself with his fantasy of obtaining a free radio from the government which ultimately,
he did not. He landed himself in much misery and woe. This story revolves around the
phenomenon of self-delusion ordinarily the youth indulges in - their imagination is constantly
invaded by the dreams of heroism and prosperous living splashed on movie-screen for all to
emulate and crave for. Ramani is an escapist, and when his fantasy of a free radio turned out to be
a delusion, he started fantasizing about being a Bollywood star and living a luxurious life in
Bombay. However, his imagination of a free radio can be compared with the dream of being a film
star as both the fantasies represented Ramani's inability to deal with the future and its
consequences.
The story is reflective of the time when the government used to exploit the poor people for its
own benefit and deprived them of their dignity as an individual. The growth of a nation was
measured in terms of its population. Salman Rushdie correctly points out, "any deprivation
reduces the human being to the level of an animal." The policy of a free radio represented the
humiliation and deprivation the men at that time went through. A material possession like a free
radio was incapable of compensating for the loss of a man's capability to nurture a life.