In the world rankings, India stands fourth and third in the men’s and women’s game (why there are two categories for a ‘mind game’ is something of a puzzle), respectively. If football and cricket are English inventions, then, rightfully, India has a special bond with chess, as inventor of the game.
Chaturanga – which al-Adli ar-Rumi, the renowned 9th-century Arab chess player from Anatolia in modern Turkey, traces back to India – may be the only truly global product that India has consistently been good at after inventing it. Considering India invented flying vehicles, atomic weapons, wireless communication and, arguably, the iPhone, prowess in chess has been kept intact while the other inventions have either been forgotten and ‘borrowed’ anew, or improved upon manifold by other civilisations.
Chaturanga (Sanskrit) to chatrang (Persian) to shatranj (Arabic, Urdu) – ‘chess’ (and ‘check’) coming from the Persian ‘shah’ – notwithstanding, not only do we remember chess ‘technology’ but still ply the tech well. A lesson that what matters is not so much where something originates from, but where it ends up.