Sultan Khan

◈A servant of the Nawab

Sultan Khan was born around 1903 — the sources differ between 1903 and 1905 — in the village of Mitha Tiwana, in the Punjab of British India, into an Awan family of small landlords and holy men. His father taught him the Indian form of the game at the age of nine; its rules are not those of European chess, and the boy grew up mastering a different discipline entirely. By his early twenties he was reckoned the strongest player in the Punjab.

Around that age he entered the household of Sir Umar Hayat Khan, a wealthy Nawab and colonel who recognised the talent in his servant and set about converting it. Sir Umar had him taught the Western rules and entered into competition, and in 1928 Sultan Khan won the all-India championship with eight wins, a single draw, and no defeats. The Nawab decided to take his prodigy to Europe.

◈Five years in Europe

He arrived in London in the spring of 1929, and his first tournament went badly — he was a man playing an unfamiliar game in an unfamiliar country, with only rudimentary English and an interpreter at his side. William Winter and Frederick Yates took him in hand. Within months he had won the British Championship of 1929, to the astonishment of a chess establishment that had never seen anything like him. He would win it again in 1932 and 1933 — three titles in four attempts.

He played first board for England at three Chess Olympiads — Hamburg 1930, Prague 1931 and Folkestone 1933 — facing the world's elite on the top board of a great chess nation, a servant from the Punjab representing the empire that ruled his homeland. Through it all he could not read or write; he kept his scoresheets in Hindustani and never studied a single book on the game.

◈The wins that stunned the masters

The measure of him is in whom he beat. At the Hastings Christmas Congress of 1930–31 he defeated José Raúl Capablanca — the former World Champion, one of the most gifted players who ever lived — in a long, technical endgame. Capablanca, it is reported, called him a genius, an accolade the Cuban bestowed on almost no one.

At the Prague Olympiad of 1931, playing first board, he beat both Akiba Rubinstein and Salo Flohr, two of the era's towering figures, while holding Alekhine, Kashdan, Grünfeld and Bogoljubow to draws. That same winter he won a match against Savielly Tartakower by the narrowest of margins, +4 −3 =5. He lost a closer match to Flohr in 1932, but took a game from him even there.

He did all of it, as the historians David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld observed, without ever truly mastering the openings — for opening theory is empirical and cannot be reasoned out from first principles. His strength lay everywhere else.

◈The art without the book

Sultan Khan was a positional player of profound natural instinct. He had, Hooper and Whyld wrote, few peers in the middlegame and ranked among the world's two or three finest in the endgame — patient, solid, prophylactic, content to refuse complications and to grind out advantages others could not see. He distrusted sharp tactical adventures and trusted, instead, the slow logic of a sound position.

What makes the achievement almost unbelievable is its foundation: nothing. No library, no theory, no decades of study. Arpad Elo, calculating backwards, put his peak strength at around 2530 — top-ten in the world — built entirely on raw understanding and the experience of a few hundred serious games. Hooper and Whyld called him perhaps the greatest natural player of modern times, and the phrase has stuck because no one has found a better one.

◈Freed from prison

The cost was written on his body. The damp English climate ravaged him — malaria, influenza, chronic throat infections — and he often arrived at the board with his neck swathed in bandages, a sick man holding his own against the healthiest minds in chess. He was never at home in Europe, and Europe was never quite at home with him.

At the end of 1933 Sir Umar took him back to India, and his international career was simply over — five years, and then silence. A fellow servant, Miss Fatima, remembered that on returning home he felt as though he had been freed from prison. He went back to his land and his family and let the chess world forget him. His granddaughter Atiyab Sultan has written against the temptation to cast people of colour as illiterate savages defying gravity — to dehumanise them — rather than accept the harder truth: that he succeeded purely on merit, the equal of any master of his age.