How India the largest consumer and producer of dairy – is now making its own artisanal cheese

A Begum Victoria cheese board. 11 min readJul 26, 2026 09:51 AM IST First published on: Jul 26, 2026 at 09:51 AM IST In her bedroom in Mulund, a young woman turned a fridge into a cheese cave. She tweaked the thermostat until it held steady at 13 degrees Celsius, dropped a hygrometer inside to track humidity and started ageing wheels of cheese. At one point, she had 25 varieties in there and the room smelled unmistakably of mould. She was still commuting to a corporate job on weekdays. On weekends, she made cheese. Mausam Narang is one of a handful of people who has ventured into making homegrown cheese. Then there’s a postdoctoral researcher who had left Canada; a Food Studies dropout from New York University; a restaurateur frustrated by imported cheese and lack of cold-chain supply; an Indo-French couple who moved to the Himalayas on instinct and now make Western-style artisanal cheese, from Indian milk.