Two hotels in the hills above Rishikesh, both trading on some version of the word 'Ananda', have ended up on opposite sides of a trademark suit. On 14 October 2026, the Delhi High Court granted an ex parte ad interim injunction restraining Ishanee Villas Tech Private Limited from using the mark 'Anandam In The Himalayas', or anything deceptively or confusingly similar to it, in a suit brought by IHHR Hospitality Ananda Private Limited.
IHHR runs the Ananda resort in Narendra Nagar, Uttarakhand, which it says has operated under the 'Ananda' mark and the tagline 'In The Himalayas' since 1999. That is the kind of long, continuous use plaintiffs in trademark suits lean on heavily, since a mark used openly for over two decades in the same hospitality market builds the sort of reputation and consumer association that newer, similar-sounding marks get accused of trading off. IHHR's case is that Ishanee Villas Tech's hotel, promoted under 'Anandam In The Himalayas', does exactly that.
The geography did the plaintiff few favours in the defendant's case, and a great deal in its own. IHHR pointed out that the defendant's Rishikesh hotel sits roughly 21 kilometres from its own resort, close enough that a traveller searching for lodging in the same stretch of the Himalayan foothills could easily run into both names while comparing options on a booking platform. IHHR went further, telling the court that guests who had booked rooms at the defendant's hotel, believing it was connected to or affiliated with Ananda, had turned up instead at the plaintiff's own resort, direct evidence, if accepted, of exactly the kind of confusion trademark law is meant to prevent.
IHHR said it had tried to resolve the matter without litigation first. A cease-and-desist notice, sent in June 2026, did not stop the defendant from continuing to use the disputed mark, which is what eventually brought the dispute to the Delhi High Court as a suit for trademark infringement and passing off rather than a dispute settled by correspondence between the two sides' lawyers.
Justice Mahajan's order moved on the familiar three-part test for interim relief: whether the plaintiff had shown a strong prima facie case, where the balance of convenience lay, and what irreparable harm might follow if relief were refused. On all three, the court sided with IHHR, finding a strong prima facie case of infringement and passing off and concluding that denying interim protection could cause irreparable harm, financial prejudice to unwary members of the public, and damage to the plaintiff's goodwill and reputation built up over more than two decades of use.
Because the suit proceeded ex parte, with no appearance yet recorded for Ishanee Villas Tech, the injunction is necessarily provisional. The defendant has not had its say on whether 'Anandam In The Himalayas' is actually confusing when set against 'Ananda, In The Himalayas', whether the two properties' guests overlap in the way IHHR described, or whether the alleged misdirected bookings hold up under scrutiny. The court's own order lists the matter for completion of service and pleadings on 2 December 2026, which is when those arguments will first properly surface.
Hospitality brands built around a word with a plain, ordinary meaning, as 'Ananda', meaning bliss, undeniably is, tend to face a harder time than owners of wholly invented marks when it comes to stopping others from using similar-sounding names, since a common word is harder to monopolise than a coined one. What carried the day here was not the word alone but the specific combination of a near-identical tagline, close geographic proximity, a long history of continuous use, and the plaintiff's account of guests actually turning up at the wrong hotel. Hotels operating in the same stretch of a tourist circuit, trading on names that echo an established neighbour's branding, are the ones most exposed by that combination of facts, at least until the defendant gets a chance to answer it.