Nishant Sharma

In our family’s account, my great-grandfather, Tej Ram Bawa, left the village of Chogawan, near Amritsar in Punjab, as a teenager and came east to Assam. In Dibrugarh he found work among the tea estates: first in the forest department, then as a translator, standing between the British and the workers. That work introduced him to a Scottish army officer who shared a private enthusiasm for spirits.

In the family’s telling, single malt was an officer’s privilege, so Tej Ram bought it from the British and layered it with local whisky until it suited an Indian table. The family remembers it as ‘Indian blended Scotch’, and it was sold quietly. When the licensing laws changed after Independence, the business had to close its doors. What remained was carried on quietly until government regulation ended it in 1985, and the craft came down to us as a story.

I was born in the same town as my father, and was taught in the same school by many of the same teachers. By my own account, I was the family’s black sheep: restless, searching for something my friends did not seem to need.

“A Scotsman taught my great-grandfather how to distil. The bridge always existed; it has only become stronger.”To Sky News, July 2025

Before Punjab, there was a sofa in Dibrugarh. In August 1995, five of us squeezed onto it for a photograph: two of us making V-signs at the camera, one hiding behind his hand, none of us able to keep a straight face. I am the one in the middle, in the blue shirt, chin resting on my hand. That was Assam. I was simply a boy among boys.

In 2000 the family moved to Punjab, the land Tej Ram Bawa had left as a teenager. It should have felt like a return. It felt like the opposite.

Two years in Jalandhar taught me what it is to be the wrong accent in the right classroom. There was bullying. There was the daily work of not fitting in, in a world where everything I carried from Assam seemed to collide with everything around me. I learned to read a room before I walked into it. I still do.

From Jalandhar we moved to Amritsar, about twenty kilometres from Chogawan, the village Tej Ram Bawa had left as a teenager. My father’s business there collapsed, and with it the certainty that a child mistakes for permanence.

I learned early that a business is not a spreadsheet. It is a family’s sleep, its dignity, its dinner table.

For five more years Amritsar was home. The business was gone, but the household carried on.

In 2007, when it was time to leave, my father found £500 and lent it to me.

In early February 2007 I flew from Amritsar to London on my first international flight. My uncle, who had settled in Glasgow in the 1990s, collected me at the airport and drove me north.

I had no job waiting and no plan B, only an uncle’s door, my father’s loan, and the knowledge that I could not go back empty-handed.

On my first Monday my uncle offered me work unloading shipping containers, seven in the morning until nine at night. The first day paid £20. I took it, and the warehouse shifts that followed, six days a week, for weeks before my course began. Then I sent £1,000 home to my father: the loan repaid twice over, and my life started fair and square.

Next came a job as a dishwasher at Ashoka at the Mill in Darnley. I stayed four years with the group, through a change of management, and did nearly every job in the building: dishwasher, food-pickup boy, cleaner, front of house, waiter, bartender, and the outside-catering team. I knew how this work would have been seen at home. In Scotland nobody knew me, and I was free to test life out. I am grateful to every person I worked under in those years. My foundation was built there.

Hospitality taught me what every brand I build still runs on: people forget the detail, but they remember how you made them feel. Along the way I studied television and film, and worked on projects for the BBC.

After four years in hospitality I moved into a call centre, selling car insurance over the phone. I spent hours listening to people who were frustrated, confused or in a hurry, and learned to turn a complaint into trust. It taught me patience, how to take rejection, and how to manage expectations.

I stayed twelve months, then moved to Edinburgh. It was the best training in sales I ever had, and nobody called it training.

In Edinburgh I started in financial services at Aegon UK, taking whatever the back office needed. Then came middle-office roles, and my first day-rate contract, as a junior business analyst on an IT transformation programme at Lloyds Banking Group. One short contract led to the next, six months to a year each, and they taught me corporate structure, critical thinking, pace, dress codes and office politics.

The big step was project management at BlackRock, on reconciliation, the Aladdin transformation and funds architecture. I finished with three solid years in fund and portfolio management, at BlackRock and at Standard Life Aberdeen, including helping to build a Gulf pension fund. Alongside that career, I tried ventures that did not work: Highland Cow Productions, a direct-to-consumer leather brand called Le Monsieur, and a few others.

Veenu, a second-generation Scot who trained in law and moved into finance, was beside me. We had the career, the house, the car and the holidays. I also had a question I could not shake.

My original ambition was whisky, but the capital to lay down stock and wait was far beyond me. Four earlier ventures had failed, and each had paid for a lesson. Gin could be made sooner, but in 2017 it was a crowded category, so it needed an idea nobody else could claim.

I came back from India with more than a hundred teas and worked through them between 2017 and 2020, until one survived: the tea we describe as “oolong white tea”. We bought first from select Assam growers and then began cultivating our own. Around the tea I built a chai. Matt Gammell and Summerhall Distillery, makers of Pickering’s, took the project on when others would not.

The formula was locked in 2020, the year on every label. By then I had left banking and taken on the risk that came with it. The family thought I had lost my mind.

Rutland Square is a small Georgian garden square at the west end of Princes Street. It is also the address of the Consulate General of India. When I became a British citizen, this was where I came to have my passport stamped before each journey home. The square became a passage: the place in Scotland where India began.

The bottle says the rest. It is square, when almost nobody’s was. Woven into the label are details drawn from the pages of a passport, a thread of tartan, and the two dates the family keeps: 1940 and 2020.

“I am Indian by birth and heritage, Scottish by life.”Food & Beverage Outlook, 2026

The gin launched in November 2021 with a few hundred pounds of family money behind the first run, and it did not sell. Retailers did not merely decline; they did not reply.

The relaunch in 2022 was done together. Veenu and I took a table at every gin fair and food festival that would have us, and sold one bottle at a time. A hundred bottles became five hundred. Five hundred became a thousand.

In March 2023 the business reached a low point: £25 in the bank and bills due.

In June 2023, in my mid-thirties, I had a heart attack and spent a week in hospital. It taught me that the business was not worth my life, and that I would build it differently. One buyer who had said no for years finally said yes after I wrote to him about the hospital week.

Our first travel-retail placement, a single position at Mumbai International Airport, won after a hundred phone calls, sold through its first hundred and fifty bottles in a month. By 2024 GMR’s airports had followed, and the brand that could not get a distributor in India was in duty free at several Indian airports.

In March 2025 Dr Vivek Anand Oberoi joined as a shareholder, investor and strategic partner, and we signed in Edinburgh. During 2025 a Delhi office opened, and the team grew to some twenty-five people.

In July 2025, as the UK–India trade agreement was signed, Sky News came to Edinburgh. The Chai Spiced Rum was soft-launched in Indian and UAE duty free at the end of 2025 and released internationally in 2026, the year the gin reached the LCBO in Canada and took Gold at The Gin Guide Awards.

Rosslyn is the new distillery, visitor centre and hotel we plan in Midlothian, and the place where I want the craft to grow up. Alongside it, our current acquisition focus is two operational historic Lowland distilleries, together with matured and maturing whisky inventory.

Rutland Square Spirits produces its gin and rum in Edinburgh today. These two ambitions are where I want to take that craft next.

Through SPIRITUS Capital, I am helping build the long-term capital behind premium drinks businesses and the assets that support them. I am a founding partner of the platform.

The aim is patient capital: giving the businesses time to build, and the means to keep going. Explore the group structure.

Ahead are Rosslyn, a proposed whisky distillery and hotel in Midlothian, and, one day, a distillery in Dibrugarh, the town where my great-grandfather’s story and mine both began.

What I can promise is how we will go on: one bottle, one conversation, one stranger at a time.

The river is where this story began. Whatever we build next, I want it to carry something of home.