Dear Saudi cleric, this Khan rocked the chess world
The great chess Grandmaster Mikhail Tal died, and Vishy Anand, who idolized him, heard his voice one day. "What's it like up there?" Anand inquired of Tal. "What do you want to hear first, the good news or the bad news?" Tal asked. Anand: "Tell me the good news first." Tal: "Well, it's really heaven here. There are tournaments all the time and I can play Steinitz, Alekhine, Lasker, Tartakower, Capablanca, Fisher, and all the greats." "Fantastic!" Anand said, "And what is the bad news?" Tal: "You have Black against Carlsen on Friday."
Apocryphal story, but Tal really should have included another name in the line-up of chess greats: Mir Sultan Khan, a forgotten legend of the chess world from pre-Partition India, who defeated almost all his contemporaries, including then World Champion Jose Raul Capablanca, and went on to win three British Open titles, the chess equivalent of Wimbledon. Why Khan does not make the shortlist of greats not only has to do with FIDE, the international chess body, which never formally acknowledged his skills or gave him a rating, ranking, or recognition (somewhat like the Nobel committee ignoring Mahatma Gandhi for the peace prize), but it also speaks to the gradual decline of chess in Islamic culture, most recently conveyed this week by a Saudi cleric who issued a fatwa, saying it is a waste of time and creates hatred.
But for centuries, chess was central to the Muslim ethos, best illustrated in Munshi Premchand's classic 1924 story Shatranj ke Khiladi, brought to cinematic life by the great Satyajit Ray. Whether Premchand knew of Mir Sultan Khan and his exploits, which gained international recognition only in the 1929-1933 time frame, is not known, but noblemen of Awadh, where Premchand's story is set, were evidently awash in the game even as the Company Bahadurs came marching in.
Although legend has it that the game was invented or devised in India, most chess historians agree that it was then taken to Persia, where it became a part of the princely or courtly education of Persian nobility. The Islamic conquest of Persia took the game further afield to Europe, even as it returned to India, becoming wildly popular among the Muslim elites.
Among them was a Muslim overlord in Sargodha (in present day Pakistan) named Colonel Nawab Sir Umar Hayat Khan, who recognized the early chess promise in his equerry (stable boy) named Mir Sultan Khan. Vigorously promoting the young, unlettered boy, the Nawab unleashed him on the European circuit in the late 1920, creating a sensation. Barely literate and only then getting familiar with western systems and notations, the young Khan stunned the top players of his generation, winning three British Open crowns. An under-reported accompaniment: Sir Hayat Khan's female servant Fatima, also won the British Open title for women in 1933.
Khan's exploits were widely reported in the media, including in The Times of India in 1935 when he arrived in Bombay for a simultaneous chess display in a club. The story of the Indian Sultan Khan turned out to be a most unusual one, wrote Reuben Fine, an American Grandmaster who played him, noting Khan was actually a serf on the estate of a maharajah when his chess genius was discovered. "He spoke English poorly, and kept score in Hindustani. It was said that he could not even read the European notations," Fine records, recounting that after a tournament [the 1933 Folkestone Olympiad] the American team was invited to the home of Sultan Khan's master in London.
"When we were ushered in we were greeted by the maharajah with the remark, 'It is an honor for you to be here; ordinarily I converse only with my greyhounds.' Although he was a Mohammedan, the maharajah had been granted special permission to drink intoxicating beverages, and he made liberal use of this dispensation," writes Fine. "In the meantime Sultan Khan, who was our real entree to his presence, was treated as a servant by the maharajah (which in fact he was according to Indian law), and we found ourselves in the peculiar position of being waited on at table by a chess grand master," Fine adds.
Whether all this left Sultan Khan upset or embittered is not known, but what is certain is that after he returned to India in the mid-1930s, he gradually gave up on chess, and by the time of Partition he was a largely forgotten entity, never taking up the game again till his death in 1966, which went almost unrecorded in Pakistan (which didn't have much of a clue about the Indian genius it accidentally inherited).
Today, there are only a handful of toplevel Muslim chess players (mostly from the former Soviet Republics; three Azeri Grandmasters are ranked in the Top50), and with the spread of the toxic Saudi puritanism, chess has been eviscerated from countries such as Pakistan, a lapdog of Saudi ideology. Pakistan's top ranked grandmaster has a ELO rating of 2343 and would rank 95th in India, and the top ranked Saudi player, probably inviting execution now, is ranked 2195 and would not make even the Top500 in India.
It's a scenario that would push Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Roshan Ali, the jagirdars of Awadh, to bury themselves even deeper into the board.
