The earliest known precursor to Chess was chaturaṅga, which translates to “four divisions” in Sanskrit, representing infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots. Played on an 8×8 uncheckered board called ashtāpada, chaturaṅga emerged in northwest India around the early 7th century.
Chess is a game that has an intellectual legacy that India probably offers to the world, and it is not merely a sport but a reflection of strategic depth and philosophical wisdom.
The elegant sport not only sharpens the mind but also teaches invaluable lessons of patience and resilience and takes one onto the path of intellectual pursuit of strategic mastery. The game spread eastward and westward from India along the Silk Road. By the 6th century, evidence of chess-like game appeared in Sasanian Persia, known as chatrang.
The book A History of Chess, written by H. J. R. Murray, says that historically, Chess must be classed as a game of war. Two players direct a conflict between two armies of equal strength upon a field of battle, circumscribed in extent and offering no advantage of ground to either side. The players have no assistance other than that afforded by their reasoning faculties, and the victory usually falls to the one whose strategical imagination is the greater, whose direction of his forces is the more skilful, whose ability to foresee positions is the more developed.
With the Islamic conquest of Persia in the 7th century, the Muslim world adopted the game, evolving into shatranj. The pieces largely retained their Persian names, and the game was referenced in the oldest known chess manual, Kitab ash-shatranj, written by al-Adli ar-Rumi in the 9th century.
Shatranj made its way into Europe through various cultural exchanges and translations, where it became known as ajedrez in Spanish, xadrez in Portuguese, and Chess in English.
It is a variant of the Sangam board game called Vallu. Known as the mother game of Chaturanga. Vallatam is also the oldest board game in India. It is one of the oldest chess-like games in the world.
Vallatam is known as “The Chess of the Tamils” as Tamils have enthusiastically played it in public forums since ancient times. References to this game in Sangam literature suggest that it was played as early as the 3rd century BC. Some scholars identified the origin of Chess to China, making the Xiangqi version of the game. By the 1600s CE, the Japanese version of Shogi emerged as one of the more complex popular variants.
Today, Chess, as we know it, is played by every Western person and in every land to which Western civilization or colonization has extended. The game possesses a literature that probably exceeds that of all other games combined. Its idioms and technicalities have passed into the ordinary language of everyday life.
The principles and possibilities of the game have been studied for four centuries, and the serious student of Chess now has the advantage of a rich inheritance of recorded wisdom and experience.
Master-play reaches a high standard and has rightly earned a reputation for difficulty. This reputation has often been extended to the game itself and has deterred m any from learning it. Moreover, Western civilization has evolved other games and teems with different interests for leisure moments so that Chess today can only be regarded as the game of the minority of the Western world.
In the Middle Ages, Chess was far more widely played, and the precedence among indoor games is still accorded by courtesy to it. It is a survival from the period when Chess was the most popular game among the leisured classes of Europe.
Anirudh Menon wrote on ESPN Sports Media Ltd website that Chess as a sport requires little infrastructure and even less space to catch a hold. It’s 32 pieces and a board; you don’t even need a table to start, and the basic rules are simple enough: certain pieces move certain ways, and you do everything you can to protect your king and attack the other one.
However, no country globally is currently producing Grandmasters at the rate India is, and the recent Olympiad performance was validation of the growing feeling that Indian Chess was finally scripting a story of a breed of players who have been inspired by great players l ike Vishwantan Anand’s shadow.
When 18-year-old D Gukesh of India became the youngest world Chess Champion by beating Ding Liren of China in Singapore, he became the 18th World Champion in the history of Chess. He broke the record held by Garry Kasparov of Russia, who was 22 when he first won the title.
His victory stamps the authority of India as a chess powerhouse. Gukesh has taken forward the Indian chess revolution started by Viswanathan Anand by winning the World Championship in 2000 by beating Alexei Shirov of Spain in Tehran.
Amongst Indian chess players, there are 85 Grandmasters (GM); 124 International Masters (IM); 23 Woman Grandmasters (WGM), including some who also hold the higher IM title; and 42 Woman International Masters (WIM) as of May 2023, according to FIDE, the International Chess Federation.
The list continues to grow in India each year. In 2024, Anish Sarkar became the world’s youngest chess player to be ranked by the International Chess Federation — all at the age of three. In 2024, India won a historic Two Gold in the FIDE Chess Olympiad 2024, becoming the best chess-playing nation competing in major international tournaments.