At the British Chess Championships, a British-Indian bloom of chess prodigies

Indian Express

14 hours ago

IN THE recently concluded national championships, two brothers Amandeep Singh and Adamjeet Singh returned home with seven podium finishes between them. While seven-year-old Amandeep claimed twin titles in the Under-8 Rapidplay and the Under-8 Blitz Championships, besides two more top-three finishes, the older sibling, Adamjeet, ended joint top in the Under-10 Rapidplay Championship besides a podium finish in the Under-10 Championship.
This could have been the result from the Indian national championship, but it isn't.
Amandeep and Adamjeet have been making waves in the British Chess Championships. They weren't the only ones. There were as many as 20 Indian-origin British kids — or British Indians, as they are known — who ended up among the top three finishers at the British Chess Championships, held at Liverpool. In fact, out of the 78 prizes handed out in the three categories (classical, rapid and blitz) across the five age group events from U8 to U16, as many as 26 podium finishes — about one third — were swept by kids of Indian heritage.
Away from the top three finishers, participation figures in the U8 to U16 age groups also show that there is a heavy presence of Indian-heritage kids powering British chess at the moment. In one event, the U12 Rapidplay championship, almost half the participants — 21 out of 43 — were British Indian kids. To put these numbers in context, as per the 2021 Census, the 1.8 million British Indians residing in England and Wales form just 3.1 percent of the population.
Add to this the fact that some of the most promising Indian-origin British prodigies like 10-year-old Bodhana Sivanandan, 11-year-old Supratit Banerjee and 16-year-old grandmaster Shreyas Royal opted to compete in the open events (events not restricted by age group) at the British National Championships rather than compete in the age group ones.
'In the main event of the British Championship itself (the open event where all the top grandmasters competed), as far as I could tell, there were 18 Indian-origin players out of a field of 100 competitors. This included stars like Bodhana and Shreyas. But there were also new names coming through, who are clearly going to be very strong players. Players such as Supratit Banerjee, Rishi Vijayakumar, Aditya Vaidyanathan and Zain Patel. All these people qualified either by rating or title or because they won qualifying tournaments. Nobody gets into the British Championship without deserving to be there,' Tim Wall, who is the Director of Junior Chess Development at the English Chess Federation (ECF), tells The Indian Express.
Wall's role at the ECF is to build up the junior pyramid of talent. But what he's seen at the British Championships is not a surprise to him because it's something that chess clubs around the country are also witnessing. At the chess club he runs at Newcastle upon Tyne — called Newcastle Chess Club — he says there is a healthy concentration of kids that are of Indian descent. Besides that, he also coaches youngsters like Amandeep Singh and Adamjeet Singh, the brothers who had claimed seven medals in the U8 and U10 events.
The English federation is already looking at the trio of Royal, Bodhana and Banerjee as stars of the future. Royal became the youngest-ever British grandmaster last year at the age of 15. Bodhana became the youngest girl in the world to defeat a grandmaster last week at the age of 10. Banerjee, 11, who is not yet an IM, took down two GMs at the British Championships in Liverpool. Bodhana and Royal are already the face of British chess: they were invited to 10 Downing Street in August 2023 by then British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when he was planning to announce a financial package for chess in the UK.
While Wall credits the influence of Viswanathan Anand and current world champion Gukesh in popularising chess among the Indian-origin kids, he also says that the success of players like Royal and Bodhana has also helped popularise the sport among the diaspora.
Playing chess as a profession in the UK comes with its own challenges. There's not much financial support for starters. For kids in the UK, it gets even more difficult to rise as fast as a Gukesh or Divya Deshmukh did in India because there are plenty of academic pressures on them.
'Once kids get to the age of 14, then all of the pressures to go for their age 16 GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) exams become intense. And then it goes on, for A-level exams (Advanced Levels) and university education,' says Wall.
Sivanandan, Bodhana's father, feels life is tougher for a child pursuing both chess and academics in the UK.
'In India, the classical case is Velammal School (where Gukesh and Praggnanandhaa studied). They sponsor promising kids, help out with education by allowing kids to train and play in tournaments. So kids in such schools can focus full-time on chess. But in the UK, you will never get a 100 percent scholarship in a good school for chess. If you enrol in a school here, you can't just stay at home and play chess and then go to give exams. You cannot skip school whenever needed. You have to meet certain attendance requirements. The schools have their own grading to look after,' he says.
He points out that he sees no problem with kids — no matter how prodigious — being asked to focus on studies as well as chess.
'I'm in the UK because of studies only,' says Sivanandan, who moved the family from Tamil Nadu's Trichy to the UK in 2007 for his job in the IT sector.
Despite these barriers in the UK, Indian-origin kids are thriving. Ask Sivanandan if there is a reason for this, and he says: 'If you are from a certain ethnicity and people from the home country are doing well in a field, it naturally inspires the diaspora as well.'
Judging by how things are going, soon British-Indian kids will not need to look India-wards for inspiration. That'll come from within their own.