On his recent visit to Russia, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi embraced Russian President Vladimir Putin much to the displeasure of the US-led West, he recalled the popularity of Raj Kapoor’s films in the land of Tolstoy and Lenin.
Wouldn’t Modi have struck more chords in India, and Russia, had he mentioned India’s greatest chess player and five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand as a product of the two countries’ friendship and cooperation?
Modi mentioned the famous Hindi song, “Sar pe laal topi Rusi…” from Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420, which like his film Awara, was a big hit in the erstwhile Soviet Union and is still viewed by many on cable networks. Seven decades after these films were first seen in the USSR, they may remain popular among sections. But they have also become cliches well-worn by excessive recall as proof of India-Russia trust and friendship. Besides, they belong to the much-reviled Nehruvian era and associated with a ‘progressive’ stream of Indian cinema that was inspired by the Indian People’s Theatre Movement, all of which may be anathema to the present ruling dispensation in Delhi. (Curiously, while Modi picked on this Nehruvian trope in Moscow, he does not appear to have relished the references to Nehru on the next leg of his visit in Vienna.)
Against this background, at a time when Indian teenage chess grandmasters D. Gukesh, R. Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi are budding challengers for the world title, recalling Anand on the occasion would have had greater resonance both at home, in Russia and in the world of chess. It may have even earned Modi some applause in Tamil Nadu and Telangana.
India-Russia ties have been valued for their military, strategic, diplomatic and economic aspects. Beyond these hard tracks are the soft but memorable facets of the relationship that touch large sections of the Indian public. Besides avenues to pursue professional courses at a low cost there, millions of Indians have enjoyed Russian films and books — thanks to the House of Soviet Culture — and the circus and Bolshoi ballet.
Yet if there is one single individual icon who epitomises India-Russia cooperation above and beyond politics, diplomacy and transactional ties, it is ‘King Anand’.
In its heyday, on the ground, Indo-Soviet ties was manifest in the legions of chess enthusiasts who flocked to the Tal chess clubs. It is at the Tal Club that Anand won his spurs and went on to become “King Anand”. As he declared in Moscow in 2012, “We have all benefited from Russian support.” This was after defeating Israeli challenger Boris Gelfand to win his fifth world title in Moscow.
At the closing ceremony, Anand said he learned to play chess at the Tal Club in Chennai — a resounding tribute to the Soviet school of chess. Over tea at President Putin’s residence, Anand told him that some of his grandmaster norms came from tournaments conducted at Soviet (cultural) centres in India. He was all praise for the Russian system of grooming chess talent and the role of Soviet exchange programmes in popularising chess.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, the Tal (chess) Club, run by the House of Soviet Culture in Madras was a big draw. There was a lot of chess then and Madras was the hottest scene for the game. In the 1990s (when Anand was world junior champion), there were tournaments with over a thousand schoolkids at games played from morning till late night.
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In those days, chess was as much a high-stakes game of the two superpowers as the race for landing on the moon, nuclear weapons and technology. Supremacy in chess was also an ideological battle between the then USSR and the US.
One of the greatest players of all time (before ‘King Anand’ arrived) was Bobby Fischer of the US. Fischer’s face-off with Boris Spassky of the USSR for the world title in 1972 remains the most high-profile match of all time. Played in Reykjavik and projected as another theatre of the US-USSR Cold War, it attracted enormous interest worldwide. Fischer won. Yet the feeling that chess is a “Soviet thing,” something Russian at which an American may excel but once, never went away during the Cold War years.
This was borne out by Fischer’s life thereafter. In 1975, Fischer refused to defend his title because the World Chess Federation’s conditions for the match were unacceptable to him. Some 20 years later, the eccentric genius played an unofficial rematch against Spassky and won. By then he had been alienated by the US, to which he never returned. He turned anti-American and anti-Israel, and lived his later years as a “stateless” person in other countries, including Hungary, Germany and Iceland. Thus, the US could not even claim the champion as one of its own.
It is Anand who liberated the world chess title from the trap of its Cold War mindset. He brought freshness to the game and changed the climate in which it was played. Chess was soft power long before the term “soft power” came into vogue. It could have added a new dimension and value to India’s diplomacy had it been recognised then for its potential. It still can, with more Indian world chess champions in the making.
Shastri Ramachandaran is a journalist and Delhi-based commentator on political and foreign affairs.
