The Forgotten Chessmen

Mir Malik Sultan Khan (1905 – April 25, 1966) was the strongest Chess Master coming from Asia in the late 1929 at age 24. He was the son of a religious leader in the Punjab. His nine brothers were all advanced Chess players, having profited by the teachings of their father. Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana took a great interest in Sultan Khan because of the marvellous aptitude he showed, and organized a special All-India Tournament, in which Sultan came out at the head. Born in the village of Mittha Tawana in the Sargodha district of the Punjab, he learnt the game (Indian chess*) at the early age of nine from his father, who was a very strong player.

 Sultan Khan was a manservant from British India. He traveled with his master Colonel Nawab Sir Umar Hayat Khan ("Sir Umar") to Britain where he took the chess world by storm. In an international chess career of less than five years (1929–33), he won the British Championship three times in four tries (1929, 1932, 1933), and had tournament and match results that placed him among the top ten players in the world. Although he was one of the world's top players in the early 1930s, F.I.D.E., the World Chess Federation, never awarded him any title of Grandmaster or International Master. Sir Umar then brought him back to his homeland, where he gave up chess and returned to his humble life. David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld call him "perhaps the greatest natural player of modern times".

His Chess career

Sultan Khan was born in United Punjab, British India, where he learned Indian chess* from his father. He was trained under the rules of the Indian chess system at the time. The pawn could not move two squares on the first move; the laws of pawn promotion and stalemate were different. So, the Indian system*, differs in two important ways from modern chess. It does not allow the pawn to be moved two steps in the first move, nor does it permit the interchange of the king and rook that goes by the name of castling. Both these differences strongly impact the opening moves and so it is safe to say he was unaware of much of the modern theoretical developments in the opening. By the time he was 21 he was considered the strongest player in the Punjab. At that time, Sir Umar took him into his household with the idea of teaching him the European version of the game and introducing him to European master chess. In 1928, he won the all-India championship, scoring eight wins, one draw, and no losses. From this particular point of view, Sultan Khan's transition to western chess is similar to that of Philipp Stamma; who only after his arrival to Europe got acquainted with the western rules.

In the spring of 1929, Sir Umar took him to London, where a training tournament was organized for his benefit. Due to his inexperience and lack of theoretical knowledge, he did poorly, tying for last place with H. G. Conde, behind William Winter and Frederick Yates. After the tournament, Winter and Yates trained with him to help prepare him for the British Chess Championship to be held that summer. To everyone's surprise, he won. Soon afterward, he went back to India with Sir Umar.

Returning to Europe in May 1930, Sultan Khan began an international chess career that included the defeats of many of the world's leading players. His best results were second to Savielly Tartakower at Liège 1930; third at Hastings 1930-31 (scoring five wins, two draws, and two losses) behind future World Champion Max Euwe and former World Champion José Raúl Capablanca; fourth at Hastings 1931-32; fourth at Bern 1932 (ten wins, two draws, three losses); and a tie for third with Isaac Kashdan at London 1932, behind World Champion Alexander Alekhine and Salo Flohr. Sultan Khan again won the British Championship in 1932 and 1933. In matches he defeated Tartakower in 1931 (four wins, five draws, and three losses) and narrowly lost to Flohr in 1932 (one win, three draws, and two losses). I would not be surprised if they make a movie after his phenomenal career.

Harry Golombek on Sultan Khan: -“I first met Sultan Khan when he was competing in his first British Championship at Ramsgate in 1929. Not that we were in the same tournament or anything like it. He was some six years older than me and far in advance of a schoolboy who was competing in his first open tournament (to be precise, the second-class). However, only recently arrived in England he was in search of a type of cooking not too far away from his Indian variety and thus it happened that he and I were the only chess players at a Jewish boarding house where, I still remember it, the cooking was indeed infinitely better than anything offered by the smarter hotels of the resort.”[…]”Despite the fact that he had little English we got on very well together, particularly over the chess board after the day’s play. Though so much younger than him I was more or less able to hold my own in analysis since I was London Boy Champion and had a very quick sight of the board. For this reason, later on, when we did meet in tournaments, he treated me with care and a sort of respect that he did not exactly vouchsafe to players who were by reputation my superior.”[…] “When he first came to Europe, in the early summer of 1929, Sultan Khan could neither read nor write a European language. The few scraps of knowledge he had about the openings had been picked up by watching other Indian players who were able to read English, and his style of play was greatly influenced by the other form of the game.”[…] “It so happened however that I stayed at the same boarding house as Sultan Khan, and that we were the only two chess players there. Considering the language barrier we understood each other remarkably well, partly by signs and partly by the use of chess pieces and the chess board. For anything complicated I had recourse to his friend and interpreter, whose excellent English more or less compensated for his utter ignorance of chess. Sultan Khan, I discovered, was totally uneducated, rather lazy, and blest, or cursed, with a childish sense of humour that manifested itself in a high-pitched laugh. He loved to play quick games but, strange to relate, match and tournament chess were a trial to him.”-

In December 1933, Sir Umar took him back to India. In 1935, he won a match against V. K. Khadilkar, yielding just one draw in ten games. After that, he was never heard of by the chess world again. Reuben Fine wrote of him: -The story of the Indian Sultan Khan turned out to be a most unusual one. The "Sultan" was not the term of status that we supposed it to be; it was merely a first name. In fact, Sultan Khan was actually a kind of serf on the estate of a maharajah when his chess genius was discovered. He spoke English poorly, and kept score in Hindustani. It was said that he could not even read the European notations. After the tournament (the 1933 Folkestone Olympiad) the American team was invited to the home of Sultan Khan's master in London. When we were ushered in we were greeted by the maharajah with the remark, "It is an honor for you to be here; ordinarily I converse only with my greyhounds." Although he was a Mohammedan, the maharajah had been granted special permission to drink intoxicating beverages, and he made liberal use of this dispensation. He presented us with a four-page printed biography telling of his life and exploits; so far as we could see his greatest achievement was to have been born a maharajah. In the meantime Sultan Khan, who was our real entrée to his presence, was treated as a servant by the maharajah (which in fact he was according to Indian law), and we found ourselves in the peculiar position of being waited on at table by a chess grand master.”-

 Later life

Miss Fatima, also a servant of Sir Umar, had won the British Ladies Championship in 1933 by a remarkable three-point margin, scoring ten wins, one draw, and no losses. She said that Sultan Khan, upon his return to India, felt as though he had been freed from prison. In the damp English climate, he had been continually afflicted with malaria, colds, influenza, and throat infections, often arriving to play with his neck swathed in bandages. Sir Umar died in 1944, leaving Sultan Khan a small farmstead, where he lived for the rest of his life. Ather Sultan, his eldest son, recalled that he would not coach his children at chess, telling them that they should do something more useful with their lives.

Sultan Khan died of tuberculosis in Sargodha, Pakistan (the same district where he had been born) on April 25, 1966.

 Chess strength

In his brief but meteoric career, Sultan Khan rose to the top of the chess world, playing on even terms with the world's best players. By Arpad Elo's calculation, his playing strength during his five-year peak was equivalent to an Elo rating of 2530. Another assessment system, Chessmetrics ranked him as high as sixth in the world in May 1933, behind only Alekhine, Kashdan, Flohr, Capablanca, and Euwe. There is no doubt in my mind that if he has had the opportunity and time, he would’ve been a pioneer in Chess theory. 

Eighteen years later, however, (i.e. in 1951) when he was shown the moves of the games in the world championship match between Botvinnik and Bronstein, he is reputed to have dismissed them as the games of two very weak players. The source of this reputed dismissal is unknown to us, but as noted on page 378 of Kings, Commoners and Knaves Sultan Khan has been quoted as making such a remark about Alekhine and Bogoljubow. A quote below from William Winter’s memoirs in CHESS, February 1963: -“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 vs Bogoljubow matches was in progress and I showed him a short game, without telling him the contestants. «I think», he said, that they both are 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.”- Another incident was related by William Winter: -“At the Team Tournament at Hamburg (1930) he also did extremely well on the top board against the best continental opposition though his apparent lack of any intelligible language annoyed some rivals. “What language does your champion speak?” shouted the Austrian, Kmoch, after his third offer of a draw had been met only with Sultan’s gentle smile. “Chess”, I replied, and so it proved, for in a few moves the Austrian champion had to resign.”-The problem with this story is that the game between Sultan Khan and Kmoch was drawn.

In 1950, when FIDE first awarded the titles of International Grandmaster and International Master, Sultan Khan had not played for 15 years. Although FIDE awarded titles to some long-retired players who had distinguished careers earlier in their lives, such as Rubinstein and Carlos Torre, it never awarded any title to Sultan Khan.

Another unconfirmed report on Sultan Khan appearing in CHESS:  -“I have known Sultan Khan since 1918. He is settled as a small land-lord 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.”-

Hooper and Whyld write of him: -When Sultan Khan first traveled to Europe his English was so rudimentary that he needed an interpreter. Unable to read or write, he never studied any books on the game, and he was put into the hands of trainers who were also his rivals in play. He never mastered openings which, by nature empirical, cannot be learned by the application of common sense alone. Under these adverse circumstances, and having known international chess for a mere seven years, only half of which was spent in Europe, Sultan Khan nevertheless had few peers in the middlegame, was among the world's best two or three endgame players, and one of the world's best ten players. This achievement brought admiration from Capablanca who called him a genius, an accolade he rarely bestowed.-

The parallels between a certain Ramanujan (an autodidact Indian mathematician) and Sultan Khan’s stories are striking. Both were geniuses largely untutored in the vast theoretical development of their respective fields in the West who nonetheless managed a proficiency that enabled a journey to England. Once in England they brought an insight to their work that ranked them amidst the very best in their profession. In Ramanujan’s case his career was cut short by an untimely death, in Sultan Khan’s case much the same impact was achieved by his return to Sargodha.

But to make something of these parallels it is necessary to compare and contrast chess and mathematics. Some of the differences are obvious, computers today outperform humans at chess, and they have barely made a dent in trying to do mathematics. This points to one substantive difference, chess is a huge but finite endeavor where both humans and computers narrow down a large number of possibilities at any stage by the prior knowledge and experience they bring to each game. In this context today it is possible to speak of a player’s intuition but it is no longer possible to talk of an inexplicable insight that leads to a move that no one could have foreseen.