Chess and Indian Grandmasters: Firsts, Titles and Records

Chess is the rare sport that India gave to the world and then had to win back. The game grew out of Chaturanga, played in India in the Gupta age, travelled to Persia as Shatranj and reached Europe through the Arabs, where it took its modern shape. For most of the twentieth century India had no player of world class; then Viswanathan Anand became the country's first Grandmaster in 1988 and a world champion, and a line of young Indian players followed him to the top. Examiners like this chapter because every fact in it is a first, a year or a name, and it appears in the Sports section of SSC, Railway, Banking and State papers.

From Chaturanga to the modern game

Chaturanga means four limbs, the four divisions of an ancient Indian army: infantry, cavalry, elephants and chariots, which survive on the board as the pawn, the knight, the bishop and the rook. The game moved west to Persia, where it was called Shatranj and where the warning to the king, shah mat, gave English the word checkmate. European players in the fifteenth century gave the queen and the bishop their long-range powers and made the game faster. Chess is therefore an Indian invention with a European finish, a point papers often test in one line.

The board, the pieces and the special moves

A chessboard is a square of eight rows and eight columns, so it has 64 squares, alternately light and dark, and the board is placed so that each player has a light square at the bottom right. Each player begins with 16 pieces, 32 in all.

Three special moves are asked about again and again. Castling is the only move in which two pieces of the same side move at once, the king stepping two squares towards a rook and the rook hopping over it. En passant is a pawn capturing an enemy pawn that has just used its two-square advance to slip past it. Promotion turns a pawn that reaches the far rank into any piece except a king, almost always a queen. A game ends in checkmate when a king under attack has no legal escape, and in stalemate, which is a draw, when a player who is not in check has no legal move at all.

FIDE, the titles and the rating system

The world body of chess is FIDE, the Federation Internationale des Echecs, founded in Paris in 1924, with its motto Gens una sumus, meaning we are one people. Its founding day, 20 July, is observed as International Chess Day. FIDE awards lifetime titles in a ladder: Candidate Master, FIDE Master, International Master and, at the top, Grandmaster, which normally needs three qualifying results called norms together with a rating of 2500. The separate women's titles run alongside, from Woman Candidate Master up to Woman Grandmaster. Strength is measured by the Elo rating system, named after Arpad Elo, the Hungarian-born American physicist who designed it: a player gains rating points for beating a stronger opponent and loses more for losing to a weaker one. In India the sport is run by the All India Chess Federation, formed in 1951.

Viswanathan Anand and the players who followed

Manuel Aaron of Chennai became India's first International Master in 1961 and held the national title for years. Viswanathan Anand, born in Mayiladuthurai and raised in Chennai, became India's first Grandmaster in 1988 while still a teenager, and was so quick at the board that he was called the Lightning Kid. He was the first sportsperson to receive the Rajiv Gandhi Khel Ratna, India's highest sporting honour, in its first year, and was later given the Padma Vibhushan. He won the FIDE world title in 2000 and became undisputed world champion in 2007, defending the crown against Vladimir Kramnik, Veselin Topalov and Boris Gelfand before losing it to Magnus Carlsen in 2013.

India at the Chess Olympiad

The Chess Olympiad is the team world championship, held every two years in an open section and a women's section. India hosted it for the first time in 2022, when the 44th Olympiad was played near Chennai and Indian teams took bronze in both sections. At the 45th Olympiad in Budapest in 2024 India won the gold medal in the open section and in the women's section, a result that put the country at the head of team chess. Chess also appeared at the Asian Games in 2006 at Doha and in 2010 at Guangzhou, where India won medals.