According to an ancient Indian myth, the Brahmin Sissa ben Dahir, who was part of the court of King Shirham of India in the 6th century, invented for his bored monarch a game called chaturanga that was played on a board. The sovereign was fascinated by the game and to show his gratitude he offered him whatever he wanted to ask for as a reward. Sissa thought about it and said: “I want one grain of wheat for the first square on my board, two grains for the second, four for the third, eight for the fourth, and so on.” The king thought it was an easy request to satisfy, until he discovered that there was no wheat in the world to fulfill his promise. In fact, such an amount of wheat bundled together would occupy about 300,000 kilometers, a length equal to twice the distance between the Earth and the Sun.
Whether the legend is true or not, most specialists consider chaturanga, whose first references appear in India around the year 640, as the most probable ancestor of chess. But where the most famous intellectual sport was born, and which represents an intellectual challenge for the most privileged minds, for many centuries no geniuses emerged to popularize it.
Everything changed with the appearance of Vishwanatan Anand in the 80s. Encouraged by more than a billion people, the boy from Tamil Nadu (India) surprised the world with his extraordinary ability, he became the first Indian grandmaster (GM) (1988 ) and went on to win five world champion titles. India began a slow awakening there that a few years later has become an explosion of talent. Boys from all over the country, who apparently grow crops in the rice fields, began to play and study to be like Anand and today there are already about seventy players who have the title of GM. Anand, who at 54 years old is still playing, is no longer alone. With ten chess players in the top 100 of the FIDE ranking, five of them in the top 25, India is now the new superpower.
To confirm this there was only one step left: winning a great championship. And this has been the Candidates Tournament being held these days in Toronto, where up to three Indian players have qualified, two of them still teenagers. Dommaraju Gukesh (17 years old), Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa (18) and Gujrathi Vidit (29) have been competing for two weeks against two Americans, the discreet Fabiano Caruana and the high-profile Hikaru Nakamura; the Russian Ian Nepomniachtchi, winner of the last two editions; the Franco-Iranian Alireza Firouzja and the Azerbaijani Nijat Abásov. Gukesh D, as he is known, is the youngest of them all. The son of an otorhinolaryngologist and a microbiologist, he learned to play at the age of seven and was the third youngest player in history to become a grandmaster, at 12 years and 10 months. By just three months he surpassed his compatriot Praggnanandhaa, brother of Vaishali Rameshbabu, who competes in Toronto in the women's category. Gukesh D (16th) and Prag (14th) are the youngest among the top 100 in the current FIDE ranking. Along with these prodigies, Nihal Sarin (19) and Raunak Sadhwani (18) also stand out for their youth.
In Canada, Gukesh D has been the strongest of all of them, he has led the tournament at some point and still has a chance of victory, along with Nepomniachtchi, Nakamura and Caruana, to be the challenger to the Chinese Ding Liren. “They are more consistent and solid than me,” said Firouzja, the last great talent recruited by Europe and his contemporary. “And also more professionals, because chess is the priority of his life, and not mine,” he said these days.
In Toronto, we are actually witnessing a contest between the old Western regime and the new geopolitical power of this sport. But this is only the beginning, since the threat is greater and many specialists estimate that in the coming years 25% of the players participating in major tournaments will be Indians. As if it were a prophecy of the wise Sissa ben Dahir, almost 1,500 years later the country that invented chess so many centuries ago is once again taking the lead in sports-science.
