In June 1929, a thirty-seven-year-old chartered accountant dressed in Western clothes walked into the Khadi Bhandar on Kalbadevi Road, Bombay, to be ‘measured up’ for a dhoti. Having never worn one in his life, he had no idea that dhotis came in fixed lengths. Weeks ago, the same man had filed an affidavit to change his name from Joseph Chelladurai Cornelius to Joseph Cornelius Kumarappa. Discarding an alien name and attire, the anglicized ...
