In this paper, a novel method for classification of power quality events is illustrated. 15 types of power quality events consisting of single and multi-stage disturbances are considered for study. A database of the synthetic PQ events is generated in MATLAB using mathematical models. The generated signals are passed through a novel Modified Stockwell transform consisting of second order gaussian window which provides the ST matrix. From the ST matrix various statistical features such as energy and standard deviation of the magnitude and phase contour are extracted and given as input to Support Vector Machine (SVM). Furthermore, to improve the performance of SVM, a novel meta-heuristic technique called Whale Optimization Algorithm (WOA) is used to tune the hyper parameters of the SVM classifier. The performance of the proposed method is analyzed under noisy and noiseless conditions. It is observed that WOA tuned SVM provides improved classification accuracy than other widely used meta-heuristic optimization algorithms such as Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) tuned SVM and Genetic Algorithm (GA) tuned SVM. Further, two novel circuits for generation of sag, swell and interrupt are developed and the proposed technique is validated on real time signals obtained from the circuits.