Recently, I was speaking to someone who had an online platform, to list my products on their site. During the conversation, they told me that they would help me in marketing our soaps but I had to brand my soaps under a different name because Kinglee Xperience was not a name that people can identify a rural product with. Using either Sansrit names, Hindi names etc would help in the identification of the rural entity. So I asked her, “Are you a racist?” to which she vehemently said,” absolutely not”. “But I am an Anglo Indian and my name is Aubrey King-Lee, should I change my name as I work in rural India?” She replied., “No”. To which I was told Kinglee Xperience sounds like a tourist company, to which my question was, “How will you know what the company is if you don’t ask or find out more about it?”.
I had recently published an article called,‘ The Search For Identity By Young Anglo-Indians’ in Outlook where I spoke about a visitor to my stall who asked me if I knew Kung fu because of my name, and when I told him that I was an Anglo Indian, he looked bewildered and asked me what that was. For those that do not know what an Anlgo Indian is, according to Britannica, “The meaning of the term Anglo-Indian has to some degree been in a state of flux throughout its history. It was not until the Indian census of 1911 that the term was used as a category denoting persons of mixed ethnicity. In the Government of India Act of 1935, an Anglo-Indian was formally identified as “a person whose father or any of whose other male progenitors in the male line is or was of European descent but who is a native of India.” The key points of that definition were retained when Anglo-Indians were listed as an official minority group in India’s constitution in 1950. With the diaspora of the community since that time, however, it has become ever more difficult to identify Anglo-Indians, much less to estimate the size of their population’
So why Kinglee Xperience? A name that I dreamed of for 15 years.
- Kinglee is taken from my surname King-Lee which is a double-barrel name. However, it is also a pun on the work Kingly associated with the term regal or king-like. Xperience without the E (I felt there were too many E’s) was an experience and the X factor was the experience of treating you like a king or queen.
- I am an Anglo Indian and proud of my culture and community and I wanted to represent my community in any small way. The Anglo-Indian community has given so much to this country and I don’t want people to forget about it.
- Kinglee Xperience is a unique name and people are intrigued and ask more about it, thus it is much easier to recall the name (and yes, I have been complemented by many about the name)
Thus the name Kinglee Xperience was not taken to promote my family or me but to remind people that we have so much to offer to rural Indian and give them an Xperience they will never forget. A statement when two communities working together can achieve greater things for this beautiful country called home.