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

Marottichal, India – Phones, wallets and half-drunk teacups clutter empty tables – 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. Surrounded by spectators vying for a view of the chess board, Jayaraj is competing blindfolded.

Playing blind from the game’s opening means the teenager must visualise, maintain and update a mental model of the board, as moves from both players are communicated aloud by a designated referee.

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

“Gowrishankar is just 15 and already something of a chess prodigy. He beats me even when he is blind,” says John.

‘Chess Village of India’

Jayaraj and John are residents of Marottichal, a sleepy village of nearly 6,000 residents located at the foot of the Western Ghats in the picturesque Thrissur district of India’s Kerala state.

In the early 2000s, Marottichal became known by the chess community in Kerala as the “Chess Village of India” because at least one person in every household here is believed to be chess-proficient. 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. And Grandmaster Koneru Humpy capped off a victory-laden year for India after she won the FIDE Women’s World Rapid Chess Championship the same month.

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 reflects the long journey Marottichal has taken to break from a reputation very different from the one it currently relishes.

‘King and saviour’

Four decades ago, the village was in the grip of an alcohol addiction and gambling crisis that was pushing many families to the verge of ruin. 

In the 1970s, three Marottichal households were brewing nut-based alcohol for personal consumption. But by the early 80s, the village had become a regional hub for illicit alcohol production.

“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.

The trade flowed between villages with Marottichal as the source of the alcohol.

But farming families began to neglect their livestock and crops. With diminishing returns from the land, villagers soon turned to gambling through card games at the liquor production houses, from where bookies also operated.

A lack of regular income and the reliance on alcohol saw many families fall into poverty.

“Young children were left without clothes to wear. Others were starving,” says another local, who requested anonymity. There seemed to be no hope for an end to the epidemic.

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

Unnikrishnan had been shunned by his family for joining a Maoist movement in his youth. He gave up the movement and returned in his early 30s to set up a teahouse in the heart of the village.

But the influence alcohol held over his village perturbed the former rebel. “It was a dark time back then for our community,” he recalls to Al Jazeera.

Unnikrishnan decided to act.

He assembled a small group of friends whom he had known from his teenage years in the village and began networking with the wives and mothers of the liquor producers who were angered by their husbands and sons for spearheading production.

Over the course of months, Unnikrishnan received isolated tip-offs about brewing times, which usually took place long into the night. Unnikrishnan and his friends would raid the houses where alcohol was being produced and stored, destroying hidden supplies and the equipment used to produce it.

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.

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

“The game brought us together. We started talking about it more and more, and people would meet to play rather than drink,” says John, who secured funding from other villages to create regional tournaments and successfully campaigned for chess to become part of the curriculum in both the lower and upper primary schools in the village.

“We truly started to piece together our lives around this beautiful board,” he says.

At his shop, Unnikrishnan served the villagers not just tea, but also his vision of a future free of alcohol addiction. And that, he told them, could be done through chess, an ancient game of strategy believed to have originated in India.

Soon, people engrossed over a chess board became a common sight across the village.

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. Chess gave us something new.”

Unnikrishnan taught chess to almost 1,000 villagers and has himself competed against grandmasters internationally. Several young players from Marottichal are competing internationally and within India regularly.

In 2016, Marottichal was awarded a Universal Asian Record by the Universal Records Forum for the greatest number of amateur competitors (1,001) playing chess concurrently 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 no element of chance in chess.

The game is deterministic – the player who makes the best collection of moves wins; and the rules and format remove the opportunity to cite adverse conditions as excuses or blame bad luck for losses.

Unnikrishnan is reluctant to say that the value chess places on making good decisions and avoiding bad ones is solely responsible for the reduction in alcoholism and gambling in Marottichal.

But he believes it had a “big impact”.

Across the world, chess has been instrumental in treating addiction and psychological and cognitive issues. 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.

Few have felt the benefit of chess more 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. Pieces are exchanged over bawdy jokes on the black-and-white board between them.

Twenty-five years ago, Vallur was fighting for his life after he suffered a high-speed crash while riding his motorcycle. First responders peeled his lifeless body from the road and rushed him to the hospital where he would spend two months hooked to life-support machines.

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

He was completely paralysed at first, but slowly began to regain movement in his lower body. Unnikrishnan and John were among his closest friends and would spend hours beside his hospital bed.

After Vallur started to show signs of improvement in his speech, his friends would bring a chess board with them during their visits. Soon, his cognitive functions began to improve. Today, only his right arm is paralysed from the shoulder down.

Vallur believes the regular chess matches during his recovery helped. “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. Vallur steps up to the plate for a final game against Jayaraj, who is victorious again.

“I taught his mother how to play,” says Vallur, smiling. “He is going to make the whole of India proud.”