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Mir Sultan Khan: Recognised decades later, meet Asia’s first Grandmaster

By, Bengaluru
Feb 06, 2024 08:08 AM IST

The Grandmaster (GM) title – the highest in Fide’s rank of player titles — was created in 1950, long after Sultan Khan disappeared from the chess scene

A man from pre-Independence Punjab who took Europe’s chess scene by storm, who became British champion three times, and who was the first Asian player to break into the upper echelons of international chess, finally gets his due. Almost 58 years after his death, the international chess federation, Fide, has awarded Mir Sultan Khan the honorary Grandmaster (GM) title, making him the first person from Pakistan to hold the honour. Fide president Arkady Dvorkovich presented Pakistani government officials with the posthumous GM title document, awarding an enigmatic genius who competed with, and defeated, some of the world’s best players at the time — recognition he perhaps never found in his lifetime.

Mir Sultan Khan (centre) playing multiple boards at the Empire Chess Club, London in 1931. (Bettmann Archive/ GettyImages) PREMIUM
Mir Sultan Khan (centre) playing multiple boards at the Empire Chess Club, London in 1931. (Bettmann Archive/ GettyImages)

The GM title – the highest in Fide’s rank of player titles — was created in 1950, long after Sultan Khan had stopped playing tournaments and disappeared from the chess scene.

Born in 1903 in Mitha Tiwana, Sargodha, Punjab (now in Pakistan) in pre-Independence, undivided India, Sultan Khan belonged to a family of pirs (Muslim religious saints). He picked up chess at a young age from his father who is understood to have played the game well himself and was also the religious leader of the community. The variant of chess Sultan Khan played in his early years was common in many parts of the Indian subcontinent back then and differed from Western chess in its rules. It was only after he began staying at wealthy landlord and chess enthusiast Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana’s estate that Sultan Khan was introduced to Western chess. He accompanied Sir Umar to England in 1929. An all-India champion then, Sultan Khan was virtually an unknown player in Europe.

Though he had little access to chess literature and learnt the rules of Western chess only a few years before leaving for England, one of the first things Sultan Khan did when he stepped off the boat was to beat the former world champion and one of the greatest players of all time, Jose Raul Capablanca.

Sultan Khan and Sir Umar travelled from Bombay on the same boat as members of the Simon Commission, and a few days after their arrival, Sultan Khan pulled off a shocking win at a 35-player simul against Capablanca in north London. Sultan Khan had a tenuous grasp of Western opening theory and his seemingly perilous decision to leave his Black king in the middle of the board turned out to be the catalyst for Capablanca’s full-blown attack and subsequent self-destruction in the game. Sultan Khan defended ferociously and Capablanca soon ran out of options.

Sultan Khan won the British Championship that year, and on two more occasions later in 1932 and 1933. Even in the years he didn’t win the title he had some remarkable finishes — second to Savielly Tartakower in 1930, and third behind future world champion Max Euwe and Capablanca in 1931. Sultan Khan defeated Capablanca again at the 1930/31 British Championships.

“The fact that even under such conditions (inexperience in the Western game) he succeeded in becoming a champion reveals a genius for chess which is nothing short of extraordinary,” Capablanca wrote about Sultan Khan in his book Chess Lectures years later.

Sultan Khan played top board for England at the Chess Olympiad three times. In his second outing in 1931, he won eight games and drew seven in a strong field — including a win and draw against former world champions Akiba Rubenstein and Alexander Alekhine respectively.

Despite reports of him being completely unlettered, a photograph from a 1932 tournament in Berne shows Sultan Khan — in his neatly parted hair and blazer — standing alongside a group of players, engrossed in a pamphlet.

In his memoir that appeared in CHESS, February 1963, twice British champion William Winter wrote about Sultan Khan: “I remember vividly my first meeting with the dark-skinned man who spoke very little English and answered remarks that he did not understand with a sweet and gentle smile. One of the Alekhine v Bogoljubow matches was in progress and I showed him a short game, without telling him the contestants. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that they both very weak players.’ This was not conceit on his part. The vigorous style of the world championship contenders leading to rapid contact and a quick decision in the middle game was quite foreign to his conception of the Indian game in which the pawn moves only one square at a time.”

In December 1933, Sultan Khan left Europe and accompanied Sir Umar back to Punjab, disappearing from the international chess scene almost as abruptly as he had burst onto it.

Strange reports later followed of him living in Durban, South Africa and turning into a concert singer. They were wildly untrue and were later retracted.

To shed light on Sultan Khan’s life after his international chess highs and subsequent disappearance, a letter from someone named Mohammad Yusuf of West Pakistan, who claimed to be an old acquaintance of Sultan Khan was published in CHESS on 20 February 1960: “I have known Sultan Khan since 1918. He is settled as a small landlord in the Sargodha District of the old Punjab. The reason for his disappearance from the chess world is that his patron, the late Malik Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana, died in 1941 [sic; in 1944, in fact]. Since then, there has been no great opportunity for players scattered all over the country to meet. Furthermore it is well known that Sultan Khan’s knowledge of English does not go beyond his ability just to read a game-score. The secretary of the late Sir Umar used to help him to a certain extent to study annotations. Now he has nobody to help him or to give him practice. Even now he is distinctly better than the best active player in Pakistan or even in India I believe. He is a genius.”

A few years later, Sultan Khan died of tuberculosis in Sargodha, Pakistan while he was still in his 60s.

It was only decades after his incredible successes that the wider world even heard of Sultan Khan. Look him up if you haven’t yet. You’ll find him in a turban and blazer wearing a hint of a smile with a massive crown-shaped trophy resting beside him. A man who went to the land of his colonisers, and returned a champion.

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