CHESS #1404

Mir Sultan Khan was the first great modern Subcontinental player. He learnt the international rules circa 1925, at around 22. Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana, a wealthy zamindar with estates near Sargodha (Pakistani Punjab) was his patron. In 1928, Sultan won the All-India Championships. Sir Umar, an Empire loyalist with political ambitions, moved to Britain for an extended stay in 1929 and took Sultan along.

Sultan won the British Championship on debut and embarked on a remarkable career becoming a world championship contender. He knew no opening theory, and often got into horrible tangles. But his skills and creativity usually pulled him out. He placed high in many tournaments, beating strong players like former world champion José Raúl Capablanca, Salo Flohr, Akiba Rubinstein and Savielly Tartakower.

Sir Umar returned to India with Sultan in 1933. He never played seriously again, and passed away in 1966. Fide is now being petitioned to posthumously award him the Grandmaster title he deserved. GM Daniel King has written a new biography, Sultan Khan: The Indian Servant Who Became Chess Champion of the British Empire. This varies in quality between brilliant, simplistic, orientalist and plain absurd.

The chess component is outstanding. But King worked from Western sources, where Sultan is often described as a semi-literate from a poverty-stricken family. King has also made a manful attempt to describe the politics of the Freedom Movement, the Simon Commission, the Muslim League, etc, in order to explain Sir Umar’s England sojourn. It is a subject professional historians would find hard to handle and these bits read like Wikipedia.

Sultan was the younger son of a hereditary pir, descended from a local saint, Mian Ather Sahib. Sir Umar deferred to Sultan’s father as a religious leader. Sultan was a hafiz (one who recites the whole Quran from memory), well read in Arabic, Farsi and Urdu, apart from Punjabi. By the time he returned, he was fluent in English as well.

He lived comfortably off the income from a 114-acre estate, which he had inherited. Sultan’s eldest son, Ather Sultan Sahib is an LSE graduate, who retired as an Inspector General of Police. Ather’s daughter, Atiyab Sultan, is a senior civil servant with an economics PhD from Cambridge. She’s written an impassioned rebuttal of King’s book claiming King never got in touch with the family, which would have offered access to Sultan’s diaries and corrected misconceptions about his background and circumstances. 

At the Diagram, BLACK TO PLAY (White: Aronian Vs Black Grischuk, Game 12, Clutch Quarterfinals 2020), black must challenge the d-file with Rd8. Which rook should be moved? He played 22.— Rfd8 ? 23. Rc1 Qa4 24. Nxe6! fe6  25. Qxe6+ Kf8 26. Bxg7+! Kxg7 27. Qxe7+ Kg8 28. Qe6+ Kh8 29. Rc4 (1-0). Obviously 22.— Rad8 is better. 

Devangshu Datta is an internationally rated chess and correspondence chess player