We met Devi through the Identities research project, a body of ethnographic research funded by Omidyar Network to study individuals’ experience of identity in India. The reality of Devi’s identity is more complicated than what his words let on at first. When Devi was a child, his father accidentally registered him for school as Devi, “a feminine-sounding name,” he says. “Because the school refused to admit me, my father changed my name to Dhinkar. But he had not foreseen that it will be a problem in the future for a person with two names.”
