New Delhi/Karnal, Dec. 24 -- In 2002, Rakshit Jagdale, a young MBA student, went pub crawling in Glasgow, Scotland. Not on a drunken soiree with batchmates but on a more onerous task, assigned by his father. Jagdale, then 26, was carrying miniature single-malt samples brewed, distilled and matured thousands of miles away, in Bengaluru.

It wasn't easy. There was a stigma attached to whisky from India, more so if it was the hallowed single malt. That is not surprising: although India is the largest whisky-drinking nation on the planet, whisky sold in the country was usually made from neutral spirits distilled from molasses, a by-product of sugar production. In those years, Indian whisky would not even qualify as whisky in Western markets, ...