Chess-crazy Chennai powers India's phenomenal rise in game

City has produced many of nation's grandmasters, including latest world champion

- Debarshi Dasgupta

"Which is king?" asks 25-year-old chess coach Selva Bharathy. A small group of children, aged between five and 10, hold the piece aloft promptly in their outstretched right hands, picking it up from chess sets laid out neatly before them.

It is a class for beginners at the Madras School of Chess in Chennai, capital of Tamil Nadu state in southern India. A collage of global chess legends - including the city's own Viswanathan Anand, a five-time world chess champion - is pasted on the wall to inspire the country's next generation of chess kings and queens.

Among the learners is five-year-old Armaan Arru, who has been playing chess for a year at home. He wants to become a world champion before he hits his teens and considers Chinese grandmaster Ding Liren his favourite player because "he plays little bit (sic) good chess".

Ding, the 2023 world champion, was defeated by India's Gukesh Dommaraju earlier in December at the Fide World Championship 2024 held in Singapore.

Prior to 2000, India had just three grandmasters. Since then, it has added 82 more of these title holders. This phenomenal rise has been powered by Chennai, the "chess capital of India" that stands as a thriving island of chess fanatics in the vast ocean of India's cricket fandom.

Over a third (31) of the country's grandmasters have come from Tamil Nadu, with the majority of them based in Chennai, including 18-year-old Gukesh, the world's youngest chess champion.

Chennai is a chess-crazy city where champions like Gukesh get mobbed on the streets and children learn how pieces move on the board even before they memorise nursery rhymes.

It is common for parents here to haul their children to the city's many after-school chess academies, hoping the cerebral game would boost their academic performance and, even better, transform them into world champions.