‘Beautiful board’: How chess saved an Indian village from alcohol, gambling

Marottichal, India – Phones, wallets and half-drunk teacups clutter empty tables –&nbsp, except for one – at a teahouse in southern India, where a crowd has formed around a chess board and two competitors.

One of them is 15-year-old Gowrishankar Jayaraj. Jayaraj is competing blindfolded while watching a crowd of people compete for a view of the chess board.

The teenager must develop a mental model of the board as moves are made loudly by a designated referee as the game begins.

Jayaraj is playing a much older Baby John, whose expression is taut with discomfort. His shrinking shoulders and swollen mouth demonstrate that he is only a few moves away from losing his fourth game in nearly 40 minutes.

Gowrishankar, age 15, already has a reputation for being a chess prodigy. He beats me even when he is blind”, says John.

Chess Village of India:

At the foot of the Western Ghats in Kerala’s picturesque district of Thrissur, Jayaraj and John live in Marottichal, a sleepy village of nearly 6, 000 people.

Because at least one person in every home in Marottichal is regarded as having chess skills, the chess community in Kerala nicknamed Marottichal in the early 2000s. Across the village, people regularly sit across chessboards, competing in the shade of bus stops, outside grocery shops and on the playground.

“More than 4, 500 people here – or 75 percent – of the village’s 6, 000 residents are proficient players”, says John, who is also the president of Marottichal’s Chess Association.

Jayaraj is currently ranked within India’s top 600 active chess players, according to the World Chess Federation (FIDE), and hopes to add to India’s growing stature as a global leader in the sport.

In September, India swept the Open and Women’s gold medals at the 2024 Chess Olympiad. Then, the country’s youngest-ever grandmaster, Gukesh Dommaraju, 18, won the World Chess Championship in December. Grandmaster Koneru Humpy’s victory came the same month that she won the FIDE Women’s World Rapid Chess Championship, capped off a triumph-filled year for India.

Jayaraj, who currently holds a 2012 rating by FIDE, hopes to follow in the footsteps of Indian heroes like Viswanathan Anand and Dommaraju, and become a grandmaster.

His dream shows how far Marottichal has come to leave its current reputation, which is very different.

King and Saviour

The village was suffering from an alcohol and gambling crisis that was putting many families on the verge of ruin four decades ago. &nbsp,

In the 1970s, three Marottichal households were brewing nut-based alcohol for personal consumption. The village had by the early 1980s become a regional hub for the production of illicit alcohol.

“People weren’t just drinking, they were brewing and selling liquor in their houses every night”, Jayaraj Manazhy, a resident of the village – unrelated to Gowrishankar Jayaraj – tells Al Jazeera.

Marottichal served as the alcohol’s source of transportation in the villages where the trade occurred.

However, farming families started to sacrifice their crops and livestock. Villagers soon turned to gambling at the liquor production facilities, where bookies also ran, as the land’s revenues began to decline.

Many families fell into poverty as a result of a lack of a regular income and alcohol consumption.

“Young children were left without access to clothing.” Others were starving”, says another local, who requested anonymity. There appeared to be no way to put an end to the epidemic.

Until Charaliyil Unnikrishnan, a local resident-turned-exile, returned to Marottichal in the late 1980s.

Unnikrishnan’s family had targeted him because he had a youth Maoist movement. In his early 30s, he abandoned the movement and set up a teahouse in the center of the village.

However, the former rebel was disturbed by the alcohol influence that had been exerted over his village. “It was a dark time back then for our community”, he recalls to Al Jazeera.

Unnikrishnan made the decision to take action.

He organized a small group of friends in the village that he had known since he was a teenager, and he began collaborating with the wives and mothers of the alcoholic drinkers’ mothers to spearhead production.

Unnikrishnan over the course of several months received sporadic hints about the length of typical brewing hours. Unnikrishnan and his friends would raid the homes where alcohol was being produced and stored, destroying both the tools and hidden goods.

Sometimes, they were met with resistance, but Unnikrishnan had amassed support from the other villagers who were desperate for change. The producers, with declining demand and little means to restart their enterprise, were outnumbered.

Unnikrishnan would invite members of the community to play chess after the raids.

“The game brought us together. People would meet to play rather than drink, according to John, who successfully campaigned for chess to be a part of the curriculum in both the village’s lower and upper primary schools and received funding from other villages to create regional tournaments.

He claims, “We really started putting our lives together around this beautiful board.”

Unnikrishnan served the villagers not just tea but also his vision of a future without alcohol addiction at his shop. And that, he told them, could be done through chess, an ancient game of strategy believed to have originated in India.

Soon, chess players became a common sight in the village as people became more and more interested.

Meanwhile, cases of alcohol addiction and gambling began to decline in the village. Families, once devastated by the bottle, instead huddled together around a chess board, competing against loved ones for the high of a checkmate.

“Before we knew chess, many]of us] were listless”, says Francis Kachapilly, a recovered alcoholic, as he stands alongside Unnikrishnan at the teahouse watching Jayaraj and John play.

“We didn’t have a focus. What was new to us thanks to craps.

Unnikrishnan taught chess to almost 1, 000 villagers and has himself competed against grandmasters internationally. Numerous Marottichal young players regularly compete both abroad and in India.

The Universal Records Forum recognized Marottichal as a Universal Asian Record in 2016 for the highest number of amateur chess players (1, 001) competing simultaneously in Asia.

Unnikrishnan, now 67, is fondly “known to the people in Marottichal as our king and saviour”, says John.

Chess “brought me back to life”

Unlike gambling, there is almost&nbsp, no element of chance in chess.

The rules and format make it impossible to use negative circumstances as justifications or blame bad luck for losses because the game is deterministic and the best player wins.

Unnikrishnan is reluctant to claim that Marottichal’s reduction in alcoholism and gambling is solely due to the value chess system’ emphasis on making wise decisions and avoiding bad ones.

But he believes it had a “big impact”.

Chess has been used to treat addiction and psychological and cognitive issues all over the world. In Spain, the sport was incorporated into rehabilitation programmes to treat drug, alcohol and gambling addiction. More recently, in the United Kingdom, psychologist Rosie Meeks argued that prison chess clubs helped to “reduce violence and conflict, develop communication and other skills, and promote positive use of leisure time” among inmates.

Fewer people have experienced greater chess benefit than Jayem Vallur.

The 59-year-old is vice president of Marottichal’s Chess Association and one of its most enthusiastic players.

Just before noon on a cool day in January at Unnikrishnan’s teahouse, he opens his match with a beaming smile, and by the middle game, he is laughing infectiously with his opponent. On the black-and-white board between them, tears are exchanged over funny jokes.

Twenty-five years ago, Vallur was fighting for his life after he suffered a high-speed crash while riding his motorcycle. His lifeless body was removed from the road by first responders, who then took him to a hospital where he would spend two months being fitted with life support.

Vallur tells Al Jazeera, “Doctors informed my family and friends that the crash had severely damaged my brain.”

At first, he was completely paralyzed, but gradually his lower body recovered movement. His closest friends, John and Nikrishnan, would spend hours a day by his bedside.

When Vallur’s friends visited, they would bring a chess board with them once the speech began to improve. Soon, his cognitive functions began to improve. Only his right arm is currently shoulder-to-shoulder paralyzed.

Vallur says his recovery included regular chess matches. “Chess brought me back to life”, he says.

In 2023, Marottichal’s redemption attracted the attention of filmmaker and writer Kabeer Khurana, who directed a 35-minute film, The Pawn of Marottichal, charting the village’s struggle with addiction to its recovery.

Khurana, whose film is set for release this year, says he “sensed the enthusiasm, passion and energy of the people when he first visited the village”.

Back at Unnikrishnan’s teahouse, the midday games are beginning to wrap up. In a final game against Jayaraj, who is victorious once more, Vallur takes the lead.

Source: Aljazeera