Mir and Mirza continued to play chess, only occasionally stopping to spit paan into their ornate spittoons or take a drag of their hookahs, as the British Raj swept through dusty Awadh in the 1850s. Oblivious and unperturbed, they wouldn’t look up from the board even as seismic events swirled around them – a dynasty dwindled and an entire sub-continent colonised. The institutionalized ennui of the times was immortalized in Shatranj Ke Khiladi, Satyajit Ray’s 1977 film which had adapted Premchand’s scathing satire of two noblemen in Wajid Ali Shah’s court obsessed with shatranj, using the precursor of the modern-day chess game as a metaphor for the elite’s apathy towards their land as its history was being rapidly re-scribbled.
Much may or may not have changed in todays’ India, though, you could argue the obsession with chess remains the same. People still refuse to tear their eyes away from the boards — peering over unmoving pieces, even as there is constant movement in the minds. As it is in Kolkata, each evening, under the glare of sodium lamps, beneath the flyover that cuts through the impossibly bustling Gariahat Market, creating a strange oasis of calm within the universe of noise that envelops it. Kolkata is the home of Dibyendu Barua, India’s second Grand Master.