Somewhere in Sargodha, Pakistani Punjab, is situated the grave of Mir Sultan Khan, who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, took the world of chess by storm. Beating some of the top players of the time, he won the British Championship three times – 1929, 1932, and 1933; in other European tournaments during that period, he also beat the former world champion Jose Raul Capablanca.
Sultan Khan achieved all these in the face of severe handicaps. One, he hardly knew English – it hampered his understanding of chess notations and did not allow him to go through chess writings to widen his knowledge. Two, the European weather didn’t suit him – he frequently fell ill and had to lie low for days on end.
What stunned the chess world was Sultan Khan’s natural ability at the game; like the brilliant mathematician S Ramanujan, Khan was briefly hailed as one of those natural geniuses which the Indian sub-continent seemed to throw up from time to time. And then, as suddenly as he had arrived, Sultan disappeared into the shadows, never to be heard of again.
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