Inside India’s ‘chess capital’ that’s behind the nation’s rise as a superpower in the game

Children from one of the Velammal Nexus group of schools in Chennai at a chess workshop. ST PHOTO: DEBARSHI DASGUPTA

Inside India’s ‘chess capital’ that’s behind the nation’s rise as a superpower in the game

– “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.

Chennai has produced many chess firsts for India. It gave the country its first international master title holder (Manuel Aaron) in 1961, as well as its first grandmaster (Anand) in 1988.

Even India’s first female grandmaster in 2001 – Subbaraman Vijayalakshmi – was from the city.

A game in ‘Tamilian blood’

But Tamil Nadu’s connection with the game, some would claim, goes back to an ancient period. A chess-playing incarnation of the Hindu deity Shiva presides over a temple in Thirupoovanur, and excavations in Keeladi have unearthed terracotta gamesmen from the pre-Christ era, suggesting locals played a “chess-like game” back then.

The state government has even latched on to the game to reclaim ancient Tamil civilisation grandeur.

“Chess is in our Tamilian blood,” says Mr Velavan Subbiah, the 55-year-old chess coordinator and coach at the Velammal Nexus chain of 15 schools in Chennai.

It certainly is among students in his schools, where chess is preferred over cricket, a rarity in a country where cricket is often considered more a religion than sport. Over the years, Velammal has helped produce as many as 22 grandmasters, including Gukesh and 2023 Chess World Cup finalist R. Praggnanandhaa.

It is Mr Velavan who spots chess prodigies at Velammal. He remembers Gukesh, who attended classes at Velammal until Grade 4, as being “calm, sincere and hard-working”, besides obviously being interested in chess.

Many of Chennai’s chess title holders, like India’s first international master title holder Manuel Aaron, 89, have set up chess academies. He is seen here playing chess with one of his students at the Aaron Chess Academy. ST PHOTO: DEBARSHI DASGUPTA

Gukesh returned to Chennai a hero after his win on Dec 12 in Singapore. At a grand ceremony organised by the state government on Dec 17, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin handed him a cheque for 50 million rupees (S$797,000), nearly half of what he won at the championship.

In August, Velammal Nexus gifted him a Mercedes-Benz car worth seven million rupees to congratulate him on his victory at the 2024 Candidates Tournament in Toronto. An outline of his face was etched against the night sky with drones during the ceremony, as Velammal students looked on in awe.

Ecosystem to produce chess champions

All this adulation for its champions is inspiring Chennai’s next legion of chess winners. At a Velammal chess workshop on Dec 18, over 30 students from one of its schools gathered in a room whose walls are adorned with framed photographs of the “Pride of Velammal”, such as Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Savitha Shri Baskar, who was 15 in 2022 when she became the youngest medallist at the World Rapid Championship.

Mr Velavan was teaching them how to move pieces so that they can establish dominance early on in a game. “This is a mind game and requires concentration, so it is very useful for children’s education also,” he told The Straits Times, adding that most chess players at Velammal were at the top of their classes.

Dharshini, who uses only one name, began playing chess at Velammal in 2024, inspired by its champions. “It is a game of patience and calmness,” she said, her pigtails held in place with greyish-blue ribbons. Chess was naturally the first thing that came to her mind when she had to make her extracurricular choice, added the 13-year-old, who now dreams of achieving “more in a chess career”.

Ten-year-old Varshan Karthik, seated not far away from her, has a loftier goal – beat his idol Gukesh’s record of becoming the world’s youngest chess champion at the age of 18 years and 195 days.

For those with potential, Velammal offers scholarships as well as funding to allow them to travel to competitions in India and abroad. It even permits them to skip classes for months so that they can prepare for championships.

Such institutional support was not available when Aaron , now 89, was playing chess as a child in pre-independence Chennai and even later on. The game, he said, was not very popular in the city until it was hit by a global chess frenzy in 1972.

That year, in what has been dubbed the “match of the century”, American Bobby Fischer defeated reigning Soviet world champion Boris Spassky.

In the run-up to the match, the Soviet Union offered money to fund one of the earliest chess clubs in Chennai in 1972 – the Tal Chess Club, which Aaron helped set up. The club, which folded two decades later, went on to become a training ground for future champions, including Anand.

After the Fischer frenzy died out in the early 1990s, it was Anand – India’s first world chess champion – who later brought chess alive again in Chennai through the 1990s and 2000s. “Even at the club, there was always a group of people watching his games because they knew he was going to bring out some spectacular moves,” recollected Aaron.

Young learners at the Madras School of Chess in Chennai. ST PHOTO: DEBARSHI DASGUPTA

‘Vishy’s children’

“Vishy”, as 59-year-old Anand is commonly known, won his first world championship title in 2000, and then another four times – in 2007, 2008, 2010 and 2012 – defeating legends such as Vladimir Kramnik and Boris Gelfand.

“I think Anand winning the world championship – and five times, too – has been a huge inspiration for all of us,” said Ms Aarthie Ramaswamy, 42, a Chennai-based woman grandmaster title holder.

Generations of chess players have grown up idolising Anand for his rapid chess skills. Some have even been lucky enough to be trained by him at the WestBridge Anand Chess Academy that he set up in 2019 in Chennai. These mentees include Gukesh, and Praggnanandhaa and his sister R. Vaishali, all of them grandmasters and part of an elite talent pool often referred to as “Vishy’s children”.

Following Gukesh’s win in Singapore, Russian chess legend Garry Kasparov tweeted that “the era of ‘Vishy’s children’ is truly upon us”.

But it is not just Anand. Chennai’s many other chess title holders have over the years set up academies and passed on their skills to the next generation of players – a culture that is now well entrenched in the city.

Among them is Aaron, who set up the Aaron Chess Academy as early as 1993, and grandmaster title holder Aarthie Ramaswamy, who, along with her husband and grandmaster R.B. Ramesh, co-founded Chess Gurukul in 2008.

While Anand did not have a similar chess ecosystem to support him, grandmaster Vishnu Prasanna, who coached Gukesh from 2017 to 2022, thinks Chennai now has one that can support talented children, even when they become highly skilled.

Indian school students congratulating the world’s youngest chess champion Gukesh Dommaraju in Chennai on Dec 13. PHOTO: AFP

The 35-year-old recalled that even as a talented youngster, he was invited by title holders to spar with them. “I had this opportunity only because I was in Chennai,” said Prasanna, who founded the Madras School of Chess in 2024.

The state, too, has chipped in over the years, offering funding to develop chess at the school level and hosting more tournaments, allowing Tamil Nadu’s players to compete with the world’s best players and climb up the rankings.

These include the 2022 Chess Olympiad, which was supposed to be held in Russia but was moved to Chennai following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Hopes of fame and a better life

Corporate sponsorship for top players has also become more available. And, as the fame of Tamil Nadu’s chess champions grows, many are taking up chess with the hope that it brings them a better life.

Some parents are even relocating to Chennai from other parts of Tamil Nadu and beyond just so that their children can be coached full time at one of the city’s chess academies .

Not surprisingly, children here are today growing up prioritising aspirations of becoming world-beating chess players, ahead of the more common professional goals of becoming doctors and scientists.

Over a third of the country’s grandmasters have come from Tamil Nadu, with the majority of them based in Chennai. PHOTO: AFP

At Vijay Anand Chess Academy, founded by M. Vijay Anand, an international Fide-rated player who coached Gukesh between 2012 and 2017, around 30 students hone their skills full time six days a week, for over eight hours daily.

The founder’s phone is filled with photos of a pre-teen Gukesh while he was his mentee, including one of the reigning world champion hugging a trophy on a stage and another of him cutting a cake with his friends at the academy.

Admission queries at Vijay Anand’s institution have quadrupled since Gukesh’s win, from an average of five daily. Among his current full-time learners is eight-year-old Vihaan Arav, whose parents relocated from Coimbatore to Chennai in November 2023 so that the boy could train under him.

Asked why he likes playing chess, Vihaan, like many others, responds that it is a game that boosts his brainpower. But there is another reason why he likes it – the fame it may bring him one day.

“If I do well in chess, people will telecast it in the news,” said the Grade 3 pupil.

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