India’s chess boom speaks of the sport’s growing popularity

As the sport gains in popularity and more academies are established, chess is poised to be India’s sport soon.

Deserving candidate: The time has come to bestow the nation’s highest honour, the Bharat Ratna, on Viswanathan Anand. | Photo Credit: EMMANUAL YOGINI

In the 1930s, the United States was a quadruple Olympiad gold winner and the leading chess nation in the world. Then in September 1945, it played the Soviet Union in a ‘radio’ match. USA played at the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York and the USSR at the Central Club of Art Masters in Moscow.

The Russians gained a thumping win, 15.5 to 4.5, and for nearly five decades after that dominated the sport (with a brief period when American Bobby Fischer became world champion).

India’s crushing win in the Olympiad recently might presage something similar. In D. Gukesh, 18, it has a potential world champion. He takes on China’s Ding Liren for the title in November. Gukesh is now No. 4 in the world rankings, while Arjun Erigaisi is No. 5. Both are poised to pass the 2800 rating landmark soon. Erigaisi is 10.3 short, Gukesh six.

Among women, Koneru Humpy is ranked sixth in the world and Divya Deshmukh No. 11.

It all began with Viswanathan Anand, who became India’s first GM in 1988. Since then, we have added another 84. Anand was world champion five times and led the Indian revolution in the sport. After India’s success at the Olympiad, former champion Garry Kasparov messaged: “Vishy’s children are all grown up, and chess is coming home.” It was an acknowledgement of Anand’s pioneering role and the fact that the sport, now looking for an entry into the Olympics, was invented in India.

This is a good time to repeat something I have been saying for years: The time has come to bestow the nation’s highest honour, the Bharat Ratna, on Anand. Sachin Tendulkar is the only sportsman to have been honoured thus; his induction into the elite implied that among the statesmen and artists and scientists, sportspeople too had a place.

Anand is a great sportsman, still ranked No. 11 in the world at the age of 55, and a wonderful example of everything we admire in a sportsman: talent, intelligence, courage, consistency, magnanimity, compassion, and the passion to give something back. “Vishy’s children” will endorse that.

That both the men and the women won gold at the Olympiad (from among 193 countries) is probably one of Indian sport’s top half-a-dozen achievements of all time and certainly the greatest this year. But India beating lowly Bangladesh in cricket will garner more media attention and headspace in the country. This is one of the anomalies of Indian sport. Other sports have learnt to live with cricket!

For long, chess had been, like badminton, tennis and other individual sports, a ‘family’ sport in India, with the thrust and encouragement coming from the parents of talented sportspersons.

Thus, the Krishnans, Amritrajs, and Padukones. The brother-sister team of Pragnanandha and Vaishali, who were in the Indian teams at the Olympiad, is a throwback to those days.

But as the sport gains in popularity and more academies are established (again, like badminton and tennis), chess is poised to be India’s sport soon. It is coming home.