Rooh Afza has been sold across the subcontinent since the early twentieth century and is about as embedded in the Indian summer as a consumer brand can become. When a competing sharbat began to be sold under the name Dil Afza, Hamdard went to the Delhi High Court to stop it.
What happened next is a useful reminder that enforcement outcomes are not obvious even when the brand is enormous.
The IP move
At first instance, Hamdard did not obtain its injunction. The court weighed the fact that the defendant held a registration of its own and could point to a history of use, and that 'Afza' is a common word with an ordinary meaning rather than an invented term that one trader coined. On appeal in 2022, the Division Bench took a different view and restrained the use of Dil Afza for sharbat.
The appellate reasoning was about context rather than vocabulary. Both products were sweet syrups. They were sold in similar bottles, to the same buyers, frequently from the same shelf in the same shop. Marks are to be compared as a whole and through the eyes of a consumer of average intelligence with imperfect recollection, not laid side by side and analysed by a lawyer with unlimited time. In that real-world setting, a shared distinctive element combined with closely similar trade dress creates a genuine likelihood of association, whatever a dictionary might say about the individual word.
Hamdard's long, continuous and documented use did the heavy lifting. The company could show what it had been selling, under what name, in what packaging, for how long, and that record is what made the case winnable at all.
The takeaways
Long use is only an asset if it is documented and maintained. The evidence of continuity is what makes the argument work at the moment it is needed.
A registration held by the other side is not the end of the enquiry, but it does make the fight longer and more expensive.
Catching an application during the opposition window is dramatically cheaper than challenging a registration after it has been granted and used.
Courts can reach opposite conclusions on identical facts at different levels, so enforcement needs the resources to see it through, not merely to begin it.
Similar names in identical trade dress and identical channels are judged far more harshly than the words alone would suggest.
The lesson for your business
Run a registry watch so that similar applications reach you while they can still be opposed cheaply, rather than after they have matured into registrations someone has begun trading under. Keep your renewals current and your evidence of use filed as it accrues: dated packaging, invoices, advertising, sales records, distribution agreements. When the challenge eventually arrives, and for a valuable brand it will, the case is won by the file you have been keeping quietly all along, not by the one you try to assemble in a hurry after the letter lands.
