Dommaraju Gukesh and India’s chess comeback

It isn’t often that an Indian athlete prevails over a Chinese competitor, but that happened last week in Singapore. Eighteen-year-old Indian grandmaster Dommaraju Gukesh became the youngest-ever undisputed world chess champion by defeating 32-year-old Ding Liren of China in the final game of a 14-game championship.

For those who know the difference between a Queen’s Gambit and a Sicilian Defense, Mr. Gukesh’s victory is no big surprise. In recent years, India has dramatically improved its standing in world chess. Before 1987 India didn’t have a single grandmaster—the highest echelon in chess. Now the country boasts four of the world’s top 20 players and 85 grandmasters. That is fewer grandmasters than Russia or the U.S. have produced, but it’s more than China. In India, “there’s now more strength at the top than before,” says Susan Ninan, a sports writer who has written extensively about chess in India, in an email interview.

The International Chess Federation ranks India as the world’s second-strongest team, behind the U.S. In April Mr. Gukesh won a tournament against strong contenders in Toronto, earning the right to challenge Mr. Ding for the world title. Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov tweeted that the “Indian earthquake in Toronto is the culmination of the shifting tectonic plates in the chess world.”

Commentators sometimes view chess through a geopolitical prism. The 1972 world championship in Reykjavík, Iceland, in which American Bobby Fischer dethroned the Soviet Union’s Boris Spassky, was widely framed as a contest between the rival superpowers. Geopolitical trends are still reflected in chess today—the rise of India, the China-India rivalry, the relative decline of Russia, and America’s ability to remain at or near the top of virtually every field of human endeavor. Of the world’s top 20 chess players, six are Americans.

Unlike in the U.S., where top players could probably stroll through New York or Los Angeles without being recognized, in India chess stars are household names. Viswanathan Anand, India’s first grandmaster and first world champion, has appeared in commercials, and strangers regularly pose for selfies with him.

These days, the buzz is around a clutch of younger players. Alongside Mr. Gukesh, there is Arjun Erigaisi, 21, the second Indian and 16th player worldwide to achieve a gold-standard rating of 2,800, and Rameshbabu Praggnanandhaa, 19, who became a grandmaster at 12. In Budapest this year, India won its first Chess Olympiad with a team that included these three young men, among others.

“What has happened in India is quite special,” Peter Doggers, author of “The Chess Revolution: From the Ancient World to the Digital Age,” says in a phone interview. “In the past five years, India has become one of the powerhouses of chess, alongside traditional chess powers like Russia and the U.S.”

India’s chess champions aren’t as widely known as the country’s cricket or Bollywood stars, but they are nevertheless a source of national pride. Newspapers splash photos of them on their front pages. Television news shows hail them as heroes. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweets about them. YouTube channels such as ChessBase India attract millions of views. After Mr. Gukesh’s win, the chief ministers of two neighboring southern states, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, got into a public spat over which could claim him as a native son. (Mr. Gukesh was born in Tamil Nadu but his family’s roots are in Andhra Pradesh.)

The outpouring of pride is understandable. Chess was invented in India before making its way to the West via the Arab world. The game also represents a rare example of Indians achieving global excellence without having to leave their country. For more than 50 years, every science Nobel laureate of Indian origin has worked and lived outside India. The best-known CEOs of Indian origin—including Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai of Google—head American companies. India’s most famous chess players, by contrast, live in Chennai and Warangal rather than New York or Silicon Valley.

The evolution of chess in India also highlights how the country has benefited enormously from opening its economy in 1991 to global flows of capital, technology and information. A generation ago, India hosted no important chess tournaments, and most Indian players lacked the resources to hone their skills on the European circuit. Thanks to rising prosperity and easy online access to chess software programs, Indians can train much more easily. “In the pre-internet era, you needed a library of chess books and a coach to become a competitive chess player,” said Mr. Doggers. “Now you just need an internet connection.”

Sporting analogies can be taken too far, but to understand how Indians view their country’s rise in the world, chess is a good place to look.