Marottichal, India -Telefoni, wallets and half driving teapots are bursting with empty tables-one tea house in southern India, where the crowd formed around chess plates and two competitors.
One of them is 15-year-old Gowrishankar Jayaraj. Surrounded by spectators who look at the chessboard, Jayaraj competes with strained eyes.
Playing the blind from opening the game means that a teenager must visualize, maintain and update the mental model of the board, as moving both players aloud a certain referee.
Jayaraj plays a much older child of John, whose expression is tense with discomfort. Its reduced shoulders and winding mouth betrayed that a handful of distance from the loss of the fourth game in almost 40 minutes.
“Gowrishankar is only 15 years old and already something chess penetration. He beats me even when he is blind,” John says.
‘The India’s Chess Village’
Jayaraj and John are the inhabitants of Marottichala, a dormant village with almost 6,000 inhabitants located at the foot of Western Ghata in the picturesque Thisur District in the State of Kerala.
In the early 2000s, Marottichal became a chess community known as the “Chess Village of India” because it is believed that at least one person is in every household here. Through the village, people regularly sit across chess plates, competing in the shades of bus stops, outside the food stores and on the playground.
“There are more than 4,500 people here – or 75 percent – out of 6,000 village residents, famous players,” says John, who is also the president of the Marotthalchal Chess Association.
Jayaraj is currently ranked within the first 600 active chess players in India, according to the World Chess Federation (Fide), and hopes to add to India Growing stature as a global leader in sports.
In September, India swallowed Open and women’s gold medals at the chess Olympiad 2024. Then, the youngest Grandmaster in the country, Gukesh Dommaju18, won the December Chess Championship. And the Grandmaster Coner Humpy took a year away with a abandoned victory for India after winning the FIDE Women’s World Championship in fast chess.
Jayaraj, who is currently holding a fide’s rating for 2012, hopes to follow the steps of Indian heroes such as Viswanathan Ananda and Dommaja, and became a Grandmaster.
His dream reflects a long path that Marotthalila took to maintain the reputation very different from the one he currently enjoys.
‘King and Savior’
Four decades ago, the village was in the grip of alcohol addiction and gambling crisis that pushed many families on the verge of collapse.
In the 1970s, the three households of Morottichal were cooked on a walnut alcohol for personal consumption. But by the early 1980s, the village became a regional center for illegal alcohol production.
“People didn’t just drink, they cooked and sold alcohol every night in their homes,” says Al Jayaraj Jayaraj Manashy, a resident of the village – who is not associated with Gowrishankar Jayaraj – says Al Jazeera.
The store flowed between the village with Marottichal as a source of alcohol.
But agricultural families began to ignore their cattle and crops. With reduced vomiting from the country, the villagers soon turned to gambling through cardboard games in homes for alcoholic beverages, from where bookmakers worked.
Lack of regular income and reliance on alcohol have seen many families fall into poverty.
“Young children were left without wearing clothing. Others were starving,” says another local who requested anonymity. There seemed to be no hope for the end of the epidemic.
Until Charaliyil Unikrishnan, a local exile with residences, returned to Marottichal in the late 1980s.
Unnikrishna has avoided his family for joining the Maoist Movement at his youth. He gave up the movement and returned in his early 30s to set a tea house in the heart of the village.
But the influence of alcohol that lingered in his village was disturbed by the former rebel. “It was a dark time for our community then,” Al Jazeera recalls.
Unnikrishnan decided to act.
He gathered a small group of friends he knew from his teenage years in the village and started networking with his wives and mothers of alcoholic beverages manufactured by their husbands and sons because of the leading production.
Over the months, Unnikrishnan received isolated tips on cooking times, which usually took place long into the night. Unnikrishnan and his friends have attacked houses where alcohol is produced and stored, destroying hidden supplies and equipment used for production.
Sometimes they encountered resistance, but Unnikrishnan collected the support of other villagers who were desperate to change. The manufacturers, with declining demand and a little funding to restart their company, were surpassed.
After raids, Unnikrishnan would invite the members of the community to play chess.
“The game brought us together. We started talking about it more and more, and people would meet in order to play and not drink,” says John, who secured financing from other villages to create regional tournaments and a successful campaign that he was The chess became part of the curriculum in the lower and upper part of the upper elementary school in the village.
“We really started to put together our life around this beautiful board,” he says.
In his store, Unnikrishnan served not only tea to the villagers, but also his vision of the future without alcohol addiction. And that, he told them, he could make them a chess, ancient game of a strategy believed to come from India.
Soon, people preoccupied with a chessboard became the usual scene across the village.
Meanwhile, cases of alcohol addiction and gambling began to decline in the village. Families, once relaxed with a bottle, instead thickened around the chessboard, competed against loved ones for the top nut.
“Before we knew chess, many [of us] They were without any, “says Francis Kachapilly, a recovered alcoholic, while standing with Unicrishnan in a tea house watching Jayaraja and John playing.
“We didn’t have a focus. Shah gave us something new.”
Unnikrishnan taught chess nearly 1,000 villagers II competing against a distance at international level. Several young players from Marottichal regularly compete in international and within India.
In 2016, Marottichal was awarded the Universal Asian record by the Universal Records Forum for the highest number of amateur competitors (1,001), which is played at the same time by chess in Asia.
Unnikrishnan, who is now 67 years old, is loved “known to people in Marottichal as our king and savior,” says John.
‘Chess brought me back to life’
Unlike gambling, there is almost no element of a chance in chess.
The game is determined – a player who makes the best collection of moves wins; and the rules and format eliminate the opportunity to provide harmful conditions as excuses or to blame bad luck for losses.
Unnikrishnan is reluctant to say that the chess is in making good decisions and avoiding bad ones only to reduce alcoholism and gambling in Marottichal.
But he believes he had a “great influence”.
Chess has been crucial all over the world in the treatment of addiction and psychological and cognitive questions. In Spain, sports are involved in rehabilitation programs for the treatment of drug addiction, alcohol and gambling. More recently, in the UK, psychologist Rosie Meeks claimed that the clubs in prison helped “reduce violence and conflict, develop communication and other skills and promote positive use of leisure time” among prisoners.
Few people benefit from chess more than Jayem Vallura.
The 59-year-old is Vice President Marottichal’s Chess Association and one of his most favorable players.
Shortly before noon, the cold day in January in Unicrishnan’s tea house, open his match with a glittering smile, and laughed with the opponent infectiously with the middle games. Pieces are exchanged over messy jokes on a black and white plate between them.
Twenty -five years ago, Vallur fought for his life after suffering a drop in high speed while driving a motorcycle. The first liability peeled his lifeless body off the road and drove him to the hospital where he would spend two months attached to the supporting machines in life.
“The doctors told my family and friends that my brain was severely damaged by a collision,” Vallur told Al Jazeera.
Initially, he was completely paralyzed, but slowly began to restore movement in the lower body. Unnikrishnan and John were among his closest friends and would spend hours next to their hospital bed.
After Vallur began to show signs of improvement in his speech, his friends would bring a chessboard with him during their visits. Soon his cognitive functions began to improve. Today, only his right hand is paralyzed by the shoulder down.
Vallur believes that a regular chess game helped during his recovery. “Chess brought me back to life,” he says.
In 2023. Marotthal’s redemption attracted the attention of filmmakers and writer Kabeera Khuran, who directed a 35-minute film, a coach Marotthal, drawing a village fight with addiction about his recovery.
Khurana, whose film was set for release this year, says he “felt the enthusiasm, passion and energy of people when he first visited the village.”
Return to Unicrishnan’s Tea House, midday games start to end. Vallur heads to the plate for the last game against Jayaraja, who is again winning.
“I learned his mother how to play,” Vallur says, smiling. “He will make the whole of India proud.”
