I was pretty confirmed of not using any article before a proper noun that shows possessiveness.
The Maulik's car -incorrect
Maulik's car -correct
But then, I came across this piece of news on PopDust
The late Michael Jackson’s old home, Neverland Ranch, renamed back to its original name of Sycamore Valley Ranch, is up for sale for a reported $100 million.
Explain please.
Normally, a person's name is definite enough by itself, and there's no reason to add the definite article to it. So, Maulik is simply "Maulik", and Maulik's car is simply "Maulik's car".
Sometimes, a person's name isn't quite definite enough. Perhaps there is more than one Maulik. We might need to distinguish between Mauliks. I could say "the Maulik who asked this question" or "the Maulik from Ahmedabad". Perhaps the other Maulik is shorter, and I could say "the taller Maulik".
Once we've added a modifier to your name -- anything from a simple adjective to an entire relative clause -- then we can no longer treat the name itself as definitive. We have reason to use the definitive article. That reason remains regardless of grammatical case. We use "the" with the possessive case the same as we do with the subjective and objective cases.
I do believe that when an adjective comes before the person's name, then an article is common and fine, either to express a nominative or a possessive.
That is, if we can say The late Michael Jackson, it appears we can also say The late Michael Jackson's old home.
For uses of the nominative case:
The novel (also film): The Talented Mr Ripley
And native speakers here in the US and I presume the UK would have no problem saying the talented Mr Ripley's apparel, for instance.
Or: The ridiculously popular Homer Simpson's son is named Bart.
For the indefinite article, consider A worn-out Mr Jones's worn-out jacket.
But you don't have to have an adjective.
A Mr Jones's worn-out jacket is all that kept the lad warm. Here, the lad is wearing a jacket of a certain Mr Jones, whose exact identity is not critical.
I thought I already mentioned (in a comment to a question previously raised by Maulik about the following term) The Maulik is not ungrammatical, however unusual or uncommon.
So, although unsual and representing a special usage, The Maulik's car was on fire is also not incorrect, in and of itself.
In answer to Damkerng's question I think this whole topic is horribly complicated. While the general rules of expressing possession are clear enough and we even teach them to children at a very young age, actually there are a number of special cases which are very complex. The reason for this, as I understand it, is that although English has, over the centuries, tended towards simplification of rules, this possessive is a survivor from a time when noun endings changed as in Latin (genitive). Most native speakers, even English teachers such as myself, get confused beyond a certain point. Errors in the use of apostrophe for possession are often made by native speakers. If somebody had asked me or any of my colleagues the original question in class, not many of us could have given pazzo's answer which looks correct.
I'll go about this from a syntactic point of view using phrase structure rules.
The structure of a noun phrase in English is:
NounPhrase -> (Determiner) (Adjective +) Noun (PrepositionalPhrase +)
(How English Works; Curzan 175)
Determiner: Words like "the", "a", etc.
Adjective: Words like "late", "great", "strong", etc.
Noun: Words like "car", "computer", plural forms, possessive forms, proper nouns (names) such as "Michael Jackson", etc.
PrepositionalPhrase: Phrases that start with a preposition (e.g. "at", "in", etc.), and are followed by a NounPhrase, e.g. "at the beach", "in the house", etc.
The notation of ( ITEM ) means that ITEM is optional, and not required to form the NounPhrase. The notation of ITEM + means that there can be 1 or more of ITEM (e.g. "the strong, courageous woman").
So, here's how The late Michael Jackson’s parses:
Determiner Adjective ProperNounPlural
If we look at our NounPhrase rule, this part of the sentence exactly conforms!
So, syntactically, this is absolutely correct, because determiners can precede nouns in a noun phrase.
As you have noted, it seems incorrect to use a determiner before a possessive noun, but the adjective is what compliments the determiner.
There are more complicated phrase structure rules, but even from the basics we can see that syntactically, the sentence is valid. However, we also note that the adjective is used to compliment the determiner when used before a possessive noun, and is just another quirk of English!
Edit: You may also be interested in using the Stanford Sentence Parser in order to get a sense of what each word functions as, and what its place is in a sentence.
