India’s Viswanathan Anand has been part of the chess elite for nearly three decades now and was the undisputed World Champion between 2007-13. But the Chennai prodigy was not the first person from the subcontinent to take the chess world by storm
Servant who defeated a World Champ
Mir Sultan Khan, an Indian servant who accompanied his master to England in 1929, demolished some of the strongest chess players in the world. He even defeated the third World Champion, the great Cuban Jose Raul Capablanca, who called Khan a “genius”
And genius he was. Born in Sargodha (now part of Pakistan) in 1905, he learned a different variant of chess and had no formal training. And yet, he went on to win the British Championship thrice—in 1929, 1932 and 1933
‘Forget chess. Do something useful’
Not unlike another Indian prodigy, the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, Khan also fell ill a number of times while in England. He returned to India in 1933 and soon left the game for good. He didn’t teach chess to his kids and told them they should do something useful with their lives, according to The Oxford Companion to Chess
The ‘Sultan’ was not the term of status that we supposed it to be; it was merely a first name. In fact, he was a kind of serf on the estate of a Nawab... After the tournament (the 1933 Folkestone Olympiad), the US team was invited to the home of Khan’s master in London... Khan was treated as a servant by the Nawab and we found ourselves in the peculiar position of being waited on by a chess grandmaster