A paper by a historian at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom has shed new light on the transmission of chess from ancient India to Iran.
Cambridge historian Krisztina Ilko’s ‘Chess and Race in the Global Middle Ages’, published in Speculum, has received the Medieval Academy of America’s prestigious ‘Article Prize in Critical Race Studies’.
Ilko found a wealth of international evidence of chess subverting racial stereotypes and structures in the Middle Ages.
She highlights an instance from the Shahnama, the Iranian national epic, which contains an image depicting how the game of chess was transmitted from India to Iran.
“Scholars interpreting these 14th-century illustrations — including two versions in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York — have assumed that the Persians depicted the Indian ambassador with dark skin and baggy clothes to underscore his defeat to their vizier, the highest-ranking diplomat in the Persian court,” a statement by the university noted.
“This interpretation is wrong, Dr Ilko argues. The Indian ambassador’s skin colour and clothing indicate that he’s a foreigner but certainly not a defeated one. He is, in fact, shown as a champion of the powerful Indian raja and a guardian of coveted Indian knowledge introducing chess to the Persians for the first time.”
According to Ilko, the dark skin colour of intellectual Indian figures in Persian manuscripts challenged the value systems shared by both Christian and Islamic worlds that privileged whiteness.
According to the text of the Shahnama, the king of India sent an embassy to the Sassanian ruler Kushraw I Anushirvan (ruled 531-79 CE) challenging him to figure out how the game was played or pay tribute. The shāh ordered his counsellors to solve the puzzle but only his clever vizier Būzurjmihr managed to show the Indian ambassador where the pieces went and how they moved.
“When people with non-white skin colour are depicted in medieval images, scholars have tended to see them in either exalted or subdued positions. So you get the Queen of Sheba at one extreme and executioners and other malignant forces at the other. Chess reveals a different, more complex story,” Ilko is quoted in the statement.
“Chess was and remains a game of logic, where intellectual prowess matters. Chess operated on a different plane where people could engage with each other as equals, irrespective of their skin colour. What mattered was ‘who’s smarter?’, ‘who can win?’, not ‘who’s more powerful or socially superior?’” she added.