by Hartosh Singh Bal
The perils of writing about Ramanujan, as I did in my last 3QD column, is that there will always be those who insist that a better educated Ramanujan would have been a worse mathematician. One response is to say that by the same token a worse educated Euler would have been a better mathematician, an argument that to my knowledge has never been made, another is to relate a remarkable story that parallels the tale of Ramanujan. A story that is reasonably well known within the world of chess but has somehow escaped the attention of the world outside.
In the telling of the story much of what I quote is borrowed from several sources, the most important being a compilation by Edward Winter. The material available is insufficient to piece together a life but it is enough to outline the story. In 1929, a man from Sargodha in Punjab arrived in England, part of the entourage of a Nawab. He had learnt chess in the Indian way, the modern form played in the West had some significant modifications, and he finished last in the first tournament he played. He learnt from the experience and within months went on to win the British Chess Championship, repeating the feat in 1932 and 1933. He also played top board for Britain in three chess Olympiads registering impressive performances against some of the top players in the world. His one game against the Cuban world champion Jose Raul Capablanca was a victorious masterpiece, and is counted among the great games of all times. And then in 1933 he disappeared, headed back to what is today Pakistan with his patron, never to play competitive international chess again.
The talented chess player and writer Reuben Fine, a contemporary, has written 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.