He beat some of the world’s top players despite growing up with little access to chess books and not having the same knowledge his rivals possessed.
In July 1929, 12 chess players gathered at Chatham House School, a venerable institution in Ramsgate, England, to contest the British championship. The field included several well-known masters, as well as one player who stood out from the rest because he was not from England, but from the jewel of the British Empire: India.
His name was Sultan Khan.
It is doubtful that the other competitors knew much about him, and they probably did not regard him as much of a threat. At the time, Europe was the center of the chess world, and though Khan had won the All-India Championship the year before, it was most likely against an inferior level of competition compared with what he would face in the upcoming tournament.
In addition, there were differences in the rules of chess played on the subcontinent. For example, pawns could not move two squares on their first turn, and there was no similar rule for castling. Instead, on one move during the game, the king could move like a knight. The need to adjust to how the game was played in Europe gave Khan a significant handicap, particularly in the early phase of games.
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Growing up in India under British rule, Khan also had little or no access to chess books, so he knew next to nothing about the theory of how to begin games — knowledge that his rivals possessed.
None of that stopped him. Khan won the championship convincingly, recording victories in more than half his games while losing only once. This marked the beginning of a whirlwind period of four years in which Khan competed against the world’s best players and more than held his own.Despite his first name, Khan was not royalty. According to a 2020 article by Ather Sultan, his oldest son, and Atiyab Sultan, one of his granddaughters, written for the Pakistani news site Dawn, Khan was born in 1903 (some other sources say 1905) in Khushab, a town in the Punjab region of modern-day Pakistan. His family were landowners and pirs, or Sufi religious guides.
Khan learned to play chess from his father, Mian Nizam Din, when he was young, and he was the best player in Punjab by the time he was 21. A wealthy landowner, Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana, hired him to develop a chess team, for which he received a monthly stipend and room and board. When Sir Umar went to live in London in 1929 so he could attend the Round Table Conferences for parliamentary reform in India, Khan went with him.