The world of competitive chess is getting younger. Javokhir Sindarov, the 20-year-old Uzbek prodigy, won the Men’s Candidates tournament, making him the challenger of reigning world champion Gukesh Dommaraju, 19. When 24-year-old R Vaishali won the women’s tournament, she credited 19-year-old Grandmaster M Pranesh for keeping her in good spirits in Cyprus.
Indians—and Indian-origin people overseas—who have become increasingly invested in chess since the triumphs of Viswanathan Anand, had hoped for even more. They had expected the Candidates to be dominated by more Indian names—Vaishali’s brother Praggnanandhaa, Anish Giri of the Netherlands and Divya Deshmukh. Wouldn’t it be grand if an Indian rose above other Indians to challenge yet another Indian for the world title?
The proto-nationalist dream has a reasonable basis. The Candidates offered a chance for older stars like the Americans Hikaru Nakamura and Fabiano Caruana to assert themselves, but soon it was clear that the young Turks would prevail. The signs were out there even last year, points out Jordan Himelfarb in his book Interregnum: Inside the Gruelling and Glamorous Battle to Become the Next King of Chess, which will be released in a few days. The book, which includes vivid accounts of the top Indian players, focuses on the period after Magnus Carlsen of Norway declined to defend his title in 2022. Bored after a decade as world champion, he was seeking distractions like rebranding Bobby Fischer’s random chess, in which the valuable pieces in the back row are jumbled up, to freestyle chess.
Himelfarb writes that when Carlsen stepped aside, there was only one top player—the French-Iranian Alireza Firouzja born in the 2000s. Only Ding Liren, whom Gukesh defeated in 2024 to become world champion, represented a country outside Europe and North America. But when Carlsen returned to classical chess in Norway last summer, “five of the top 10 players were children of the 2000s. Three were from India and one from China”. The age trend had been visible even earlier. Like mathematicians, chess players shine brightest in their teens and early twenties. Gukesh was the youngest world champion ever at 18. Garry Kasparov was 22 when he bested Anatoly Karpov in 1985.
Indians saw opportunities in chess in the 1980s and 90s, when cricket was the only sport in which India excelled. Organisations like the Alekhine Chess Club in Kolkata, a soft diplomacy initiative of the USSR, mentored promising players like Dibyendu Barua, India’s second grandmaster. But as Viswanathan Anand has pointed out, Indian families regarded chess as a hobby, to be left behind by their children in high school as they prepared for careers.
From one grandmaster in 1988, India now has over 90. This would not have been possible without changes in parental attitudes. Chess is a cerebral sport, making it more acceptable than, say, hockey. The game opens up the world—apart from Cyprus, this year’s venues include locations in Poland, the UK and Spain.
It offers quick returns, too. Gukesh has already earned `21 crore—enough for a lifetime of leisure in India. Aspirants who don’t make the big league can sustain careers coaching the stars and running chess academies, to which tiger moms and dads are herding their kids. Or, there are roles like those of chess evangelist and YouTuber Sagar Shah and columnist Devangshu Datta, who have perhaps given as much impetus to the sport in India as the grandmasters who lead by example.
Alternative careers like chess will become even more attractive as AI bites deep into the traditional job market. Parents might not mind if their children cut schooling for a dignified calling. In the perception of the middle-class Indian, the game of kings has more dignity than YouTube pakodanomics.
Could India’s growing presence in chess become a nationalist thing? Was the excitement over the 2026 Candidates an early warning? Nationalism has made cricket, the gentlemen’s game, hostage to some of the worst instincts. It could happen in other sports, too.
India has a genuine historical claim to chess, not like the absurd claims about plastic surgery and powered flight in ancient times. Central Asian sources explicitly attribute it to India, where the strategic game of chaturanga—meaning four arms, reflecting the four wings of an Indian imperial army—probably developed in the Gupta period. Then it travelled the trade routes to Iran, where chaturanga was sound-shifted to shatranj, spread through the rapidly growing Muslim world and reached Europe via the Arab conquest of Spain.
Historian Krisztina Ilko is working on a book, The Pawns of History: A New Approach Towards the Global Middle Ages, which sees chess as a form of cross-cultural communication in the Old World. In a related article in the University of Chicago journal Speculum, Ilko had focused on art in the Iranian epic Shahnama depicting a dark-skinned Indian playing chess with an Iranian minister, and argued that despite the Old World associations of colour which are the basis of modern racism, this image and other paintings depicting Africans show that in medieval chess, cultures met as intellectual equals. As Indians begin to reclaim the game with remarkable energy and success, it’s an important observation to keep in mind.
Pratik Kanjilal | SPEAKEASY | Senior Fellow, Henry J Leir Institute of Migration and Human Security, Fletcher School, Tufts University
(Views are personal)
(Tweets @pratik_k)