Chess comes home to India

The roots of chess probably go back to India of over two millennia ago. The first literary references stem from around 600 AD ( CE ) , thus indicating that chess was already well established in the general consciousness. 

In 19th century chess, the Brahmin Moheschunder Bannerjee from Calcutta established a formidable reputation in numerous games against the powerful English master John Jo Cochrane. In the 1930s, Sultan Khan briefly visited Europe, represented the British Empire at Olympiad level, and even defeated the mighty and near invincible Capablanca. In the early years of the 21st century, Viswanathan Anand held the world title for six years before ceding the palm to Carlsen.

But now chess has finally come home to India, with a double victory in the recently concluded Chess Olympiad in Budapest, taking gold in both the female and Open sections. The Indian Open team was led by Gukesh D, who will be the youngest challenger ever, when he fights the Chinese world champion, Ding Liren, for the supreme accolade later this year in Singapore — a contest endowed by sponsors, Google, with a multi–million dollar prize fund. 

I n the absence of Carlsen, that chessboard Achilles, sulking in his tent, I had categorised the forthcoming battle in Singapore as a combat between relative Lilliputians, or, as Milton put it in Paradise Lost: that small infantry. However, after his epic performance in the Olympiad, Gukesh is beginning to show signs of developing Brobdingnagian growth hormones. In Budapest Gukesh (born May 29, 2006) representing India on top board, scored an undefeated eight and a half points from ten games, including a victory against the dangerous former world title challenger, Fabiano Caruana. 

Let us now return to the possible origins of our game, which seems, inexorably, to be coming home to India, and in increasingly spectacular fashion. 

Petteia was a classical Greek board game, or group of games, mentioned both by Plato, and by Aristotle, the latter of whom was to become the personal tutor of Alexander the Great. Petteia clearly demanded pure reason, it symbolised warfare and, crucially, it was played without dice. However, it was not yet chess. 

Around 330 BC , Alexander the Great invaded Persia and marched on towards Asia Minor and India. En route he founded Hellenic colonies which lasted for centuries. Many of these were, for obvious megalomaniac reasons,  named “Alexandria”; the name still persists in corrupted versions, such as Kandahar in Afghanistan and  İskenderun in Turkey. The Greek colonists, assuming, of course, that they were good students of Plato and Aristotle, would have played petteia and Hellenic influence in the Arabic and Indian regions would have been considerable. Indeed, Alexander figures in the Quran, so huge was his impact , where he appears under the fearsome sounding name of Dul Karnain, the horned one, doubtless referring to his signature ram ’s -horn helmet. 

The centrality of gambling in ancient India was reflected in their giant national epic  The Mahabharata . It is, therefore, hardly surprising that a powerful element of gambling and risk should have invaded the territory of their social games. This epic poem, written in the fourth century BC, is central to Indian culture. It is the longest poem ever written, extending for more than 100,000 stanzas, around 15 times the length of  The Bible .  The Mahabharata  even contains within itself a shorter version of the that other Sanskrit epic,  The Ramayana .  The Mahabharata  goes back to the sixth century BC.

Through this vast poem runs the ineluctable pressure of predestination in human affairs. Typically, human action is puppet-like, in the hands of the gods. Indeed, the Pandava Prince in the Mahabharata loses his entire kingdom on the throw of dice. A culture which produced such an epic is liable to have as its predominant mode of board games, those which are determined by chance, by the throw of dice, rather than by free will. On the other hand, a culture which believes essentially in free will, that human beings are in charge of their own affairs, will play quite a different type of game. These will be games where strategies are conceived exclusively by the players, without the intervention of the aleatory element of dice. This was precisely what characterised the Greek petteia, which perfectly fits the bill for the necessary injection of logic and reason, which characterises chess. 

Sure enough, chaturanga has been identified as just such a dice game, played in India during the long period when  The Mahabharata  (an epic of battle) was achieving its definitive form. Chaturanga is the earliest precursor of chess that has been clearly recognised. The Sanskrit name, meaning “Divided into Four”, was also a term for the Indian army of the time, which was composed of four divisions: the elephants, the chariots, the cavalry, and the infantry. The word “chaturanga” looks alien, but it becomes less so if one thinks of the Latin, French, Spanish or Russian words for “four” (quattuor/quatre/cuatro/четыре aka chye-tir-ye). Indeed, dwell on “quarter angle” for a moment, and the linguistic roots in the Sanskrit become even more obvious. Documentary evidence for this dice game exists from the beginning of the seventh century AD. It is, however, more than likely that its ancestry is vastly more ancient.

Indeed, it is my contention, based on ingenious and inspired  speculation by the respected Russian Grandmaster, the late Yuri Averbakh , that in the centuries after the establishment of the Hellenic colonies on the route of Alexander, chaturanga, the Indian war game of chance met petteia, the Greek game of reason and from this collision  of cultures, chess was born. The liberating affect of petteia was, according to Averbakh’s theory, to eliminate the dice element from chaturanga.

And to finish we have a spicy selection of just deserts…

Dommaraju Gukesh vs. Fabiano Caruana (2024)

Viswanathan Anand vs. Magnus Carlsen (2014)

Sultan Khan vs. Jose Raul Capablanca (1930)

Bonnerjee Mohishunder vs. John Cochrane (1860)

Ray’s 206th book, “  Chess in the Year of the King  ”, written in collaboration with Adam Black, and his 207th, “  Napoleon and Goethe: The Touchstone of Genius  ” (which discusses their relationship with chess) are available from Amazon and Blackwells. 

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