Between Vishy 2013 & Gukesh 2024: Story of India’s rise as a chess power

Gukesh becomes the first Indian to occupy the throne since Viswanathan Anand, a five-time champion, relinquished it to Magnus Carlsen in 2013. And after Anand lost his rematch against Carlsen in 2014, no Indian grandmaster came close to even being in the championship race — until Gukesh.

That said, Indian chess did not by any means stagnate in the interim decade. Here is what happened since the end of Anand’s reign in 2013, and the ascension of Gukesh in 2024.

Achievements galore

Beyond the World Chess Championship, success in chess comes in many forms. Take for instance the successes of Koneru Humpy and Harika Dronavalli, the first two Indian women to become grandmasters.

Humpy in 2019 returned from a two-year sabbatical to claim the Women’s World Rapid Championship. And before Indian youngsters like Gukesh and Arjun Erigaisi started to challenge for the top spots in the FIDE rankings, Humpy remained a constant in the top 5 over the past decade. Between October 2007 and February 2019, she did not fall out of the top five in women’s rankings even once, and peaked at number 2, a position she occupied for 22 months at a stretch.

Like Humpy, Harika Dronavalli also had some notable results on the 64 squares, winning bronze medals at the Women’s World Championships in 2012, 2015 and 2017. Back then, the Women’s World Championship would be held in a knockout format, with medals on offer for the top three finishers.

What’s perhaps even more notable is that in the decade between Anand vacating the world champion’s throne and Gukesh becoming world champion, India produced 50 grandmasters — the highest title on offer in chess. For context, in the 25 years since Anand became India’s first GM in 1988, India had managed to produce only 35 grandmasters.

Young guns rise

In team events too, India flexed its muscles on the chess board. In the 2020 Chess Olympiad, the Indian team were joint gold medallists with Russia. Two years later, at the Chennai Olympiad in 2022, the world got the first real glimpse of future world-beaters like Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa, Arjun Erigaisi and Nihal Sarin. India ended up with two bronze medals, with Gukesh stumbling in the final few steps to miss out on a richly-deserved team gold medal.

But the teenager more than made up for it this year at the Budapest Olympiad, which was a coming-of-age event for Indian chess as a whole when both the Indian open team and women’s team bagged team golds, and the contingent bagging the overall gold medal. There were also four individual gold medals, including one for Gukesh.

Gukesh had caught the eye of the world back in 2019 when he became a GM at the tender age of 12 years, 7 months and 17 days — the second youngest to do so in the history of the sport. Although he missed out on becoming the youngest ever GM, he notably became a GM almost 10 months faster than Carlsen, whose career has become a yardstick for modern-day success on the chessboard.

Becoming a chess nation

The success that Indian chess is enjoying at the moment is due to a few factors.

First, as the internet started to penetrate into all corners of India, grandmasters started to emerge from towns and cities with no real chess tradition to speak of. Arjun Erigaisi, for instance, comes from Warangal. Thanks to the internet, he could access elite trainers, like Srinath Narayanan who were grandmasters themselves, at a very early age.

Moreover, with many tournaments being played online in the pandemic and post-Covid era, players like Praggnandhaa and Arjun could now face players of Carlsen’s and Hikaru Nakamura’s calibre more frequently.

Second, it must also be noted that a whole generation of grandmasters from India — the likes of Vishnu Prasanna, Surya Shekhar Ganguly, R B Ramesh and Srinath — switched to coaching early on. The current golden generation is reaping the rewards of their decision.

While Srinath has trained Arjun and Nihal Sarin in their formative years, Ramesh guided Praggnandhaa, Vaishali and Aravindh Chithambaram. Vishnu was the man behind Gukesh becoming India’s youngest grandmaster.

Gukesh has made history by becoming the youngest ever world champion, at the age of only 18. But the way things are going, the teenager might find himself fighting another Indian in the 2026 world championship.

As chess legend Garry Kasparov recently declared: “Gukesh’s victory caps a phenomenal year for India. Combined with their Olympiad dominance, chess has returned to its cradle and the era of ‘Vishy’s children’ is truly upon us!”