The FIDE Women's Chess World Cup is among the most grueling of tournaments. It goes on for nearly a month and features more than 100 players, prodigies to world champions, across age and nationalities.
India's 19-year-old Divya Deshmukh entered this year's event in Georgia as an underdog. Over the course of the July tournament, she had opponents ranked far higher than her on the ropes, pushing them to tie-breakers, forcing errors under time pressure.
She was in tears after her final round thriller against another chess master from India — the world's #6 ranked Koneru Humpy. After winning the match, all Deshmukh could talk about was her mistakes. "I'm pretty sure at some point I messed it up," she said, "perhaps I should not have allowed g4, I should've just gone rook a3-f3-g3 and that should be a win." (For all you non-chess gurus, these abbreviations describe certain moves.)
She allowed herself a smile only when the interviewer interrupted her: "Divya, you just won the World Cup!"
The tenacity of players like Deshmukh is in part why Indian chess has had a dream-run in recent years. Last year, both of its men's and women's teams swept the Chess Olympiad — the Olympics of chess — held in Budapest, Hungary. At the World Chess Championship in Singapore, held in December, Indian national Gukesh Dommaraju became the youngest-ever world champion at age 18. Even the final round of this year's women's chess world cup was an all-Indian affair.
Deshmukh's victory makes her India's 88th "grand master" –- a title given only to the world's best. It also doubles India's chances at next year's women's world chess championship.
This is a remarkable shift. After decades of Russian and European chess dominance, the spotlight is on India, the likely birthplace of the ancient game. Many historians believe that modern chess originated from chaturanga, an ancient Indian board game that spread to the world via traders, pilgrims and conquerors.
Home of champs
Chess has seen a worldwide resurgence since the pandemic-induced lockdown. Netflix's smash-hit chess drama The Queen's Gambit came out the year the pandemic started, and with more leisure time, people began playing on platforms like chess.com and watching on YouTube. India has been among the biggest beneficiaries of the boom.
Deshmukh belongs to Nagpur, a city in central India better known for its oranges than sportspersons. She was introduced to the game at age 5 accidentally. As she said in a 2023 interview, she wanted to join a badminton club but a coach pointed out she was too short for the game. "There was a chess class happening in the same building, so my parents took me there. I liked the sport. Then, I just stuck with chess."
But the southern state of Tamil Nadu, and its coastal capital Chennai, is seen as the epicenter of chess. A third of all Indian grand masters are born in Tamil Nadu. Both of India's world champions, Viswanathan Anand, a five-time winner, and Gukesh Dommaraju, the current reigning champion, are from Chennai.
Chennai is the "factory of Indian chess," says Venkat Saravanan, a chess trainer who often writes about the game for national newspapers.
He says the city's excellence is created by a system of "teaching from the grassroots." Some schools grant promising chess players holidays to train and travel. Local businesses pay their expenses. Then there are Chennai's parents.
Typically, Indian parents don't encourage their kids to seriously pursue sports. "In India, we have this basic belief among parents that our way to happiness and prosperity is through academics," says Saravanan. "Chess in some respects resembles academics."
It's why chess clubs have mushroomed across the city, many of them run by former grand masters.
Training the next chess generation
At the Madras Chess Academy, children trickle in after school. They sit in a windowless room, surrounded by portraits of chess legends, including world champion Gukesh Dommaraju, once a student here.
Many of these dozen or so kids spend their weekends sparring at chess tournaments across Chennai. If they perform well, trainers like Selvabharathy — he only has one name — invites them to stand before the class, and orders the other kids to clap, as he did on a recent day.
"That's what I mean: 100% honesty and dedication toward chess," says Selvabharathy, pointing to the pint-sized boy standing awkwardly in front of the other children. "Don't say, 'Sir, I don't have time.' Everyone has time."
Chess coach Vishnu Prasanna started this academy two years ago. He says the day before NPR visited, one parent walked in with their 3 1/2-year-old child to train. Another parent, Suresh Dasarathan, proudly shared his 6-year-old son's daily routine: Wake up at 7, an hour of chess practice, school, then an hour of chess coaching at the club, then homework and bedtime at 9 p.m.
"If he's good at chess," Dasarathan says, he'll support his son all the way to international games. "That is a dream. My dream."
Parents often play a crucial role in the success of young prodigies. Gukesh's father Rajinikanth would put his day-job as a surgeon on hold to double up as a de facto manager of his son. The mother of chess' star siblings Praggnananda and Vaishali Rameshbabu often travels with them with Indian spices and cookware so her kids can eat home-cooked meals of rice and sambar soup.
But one 6-year-old girl, Rivina, says some parents at chess tournaments also get overbearing. "They will say, 'I will give you dinner only if you win this game.' Some kids will just cry if they don't win," she says.
India's first world champ and his 'kids'
The Soviet Union dominated the chess world for most of the 20th century. In 1972, American maverick Bobby Fischer first breached the frontier by winning the world championship at the height of the Cold War. Other countries produced chess stars. In 1995, India got its first world champion in Chennai-born Viswanathan Anand. Today, his successors in India are often called "Vishy's kids."
Now 55, Anand is still among the world's top 10 players. In his heyday, he says, chess was a hobby to be tolerated, something parents discouraged so you could go "back to your studies, because you need a real job."
Anand thinks the culture surrounding chess has changed because now, it's something you can make a living from. That's key in a country where good-paying jobs are scarce.
The Indian government often gives high-ranking players a job in the public sector — a dream opportunity for many because of the job security and perks: monthly pay, housing allowance, pension, insurance and paid leave they can use to practice. High-ranking players can win prize money in a newly launched global Chess League. Many also work as chess coaches.
Player and coach Srinath Narayanan says, such opportunities of forging a career in chess is why Indian parents often drive their kids so hard.
"In India, there is a massive supply of people and very limited seats available for excellence. And something like sport is also seen as a way to jump the queue."
But some chess watchers say there's a major obstacle to India becoming the world's unchallenged chess power: the English language. Most chess books, software and classes are in English. The government's 2011 population census found that a little more than 10% of Indians fluently speak the language. Most English-speakers in India are from the country's country's middle and upper classes.
Enter YouTube
One man wants to move beyond that.
Two years ago, Venkatesh Enumalai founded the Tamil Chess Channel on YouTube. It teaches the basics of chess in Tamil, a language spoken by some 80 million Indians, concentrated in the southern state of Tamil Nadu. The channel has more than 80,000 followers and millions of views, including among Tamil-speakers in Sri Lanka and the United States. One of his students there, he says, became a state champion in Illinois recently.
Buoyed by such success stories, Enumalai quit his day job with the sales team of a pharma company and started a chess club in Chennai, offering coaching at a little over $10 a month to make it affordable. He says he intends to travel and conduct chess boot camps for students in rural parts.
As the world's most populous country, India has numbers on its side. Enumalai says it just needs a nudge to become a chess powerhouse. "If we can nurture so many people at the bottom level, maybe we will be able to become a number one nation."
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