Meet the lady who taught Viswanathan Anand his baby steps in chess

Susheela Viswanathan is considered a role model parent in India because she moulded the chess career of five-time World champion Viswanathan Anand. Susheela taught her son the moves when he was just five and always accompanied him in tournaments. She was instrumental in starting a trend in Indian chess with parents providing support to children.

Anand watched Susheela and his sister play chess at home and wanted to learn the game. But learning was not enough for the little boy. Susheela found Tal Chess Club in Chennai for Anand to pursue his passion and was with him until he played some of the big matches in the 1990s.

“I don’t want to say that I was behind his achievement,” says Susheela. “A mother has to be by the side of the child taking baby steps in any field. In my case, it happened to be chess,” adds Susheela, who vows she would watch his son’s moves in Chennai against Magnus Carlsen on the Internet, if not in person.

It is difficult to say whether Anand would have become a world champion if Susheela had not found the talent in him and nursed his career along. But there was a thin line that separated Susheela from the modern parents who persuaded their children into careers.

Susheela Thipsay, mother of GM Pravin Thipsay, had a somewhat similar role to play in his son’s chess progress. “When I started playing, parents had no direct role to play. That was the social set-up, at least in urban India. My parents never visited the tournament hall or accompanied any of us, neither did the parents of my contemporaries,” says Pravin, whose brothers Abhay and Sathish also played at the top junior national level.

But that did not mean she had no role in shaping the careers. Pravin played the inter-school chess competition in the 1970s in Mumbai only because his mother put him in a school that encouraged chess. “Had I not played inter-school, I might not have played chess at all,” Pravin told dna.

Dibyendu Barua of West Bengal, India’s second GM after Anand, had his father accompanying his son in chess tournaments. He even gave up his job to help further his son’s career.

But there was always a difference in what they did for their children. “Anand’s mother always accompanied him and took care of him,” recounts Thipsay. “But she never interfered in the game or technical matters including protests.”

In top-level chess, there are many examples in which the parents played pivotal roles in the careers of their sons or daughters. The Polgar sisters are the most striking case as Laszlo Polgar, father of Judit, Zsusza and Sofia, the Hungarian trio who made headlines in the late 1980s, initiated an experiment of bringing up children in special conditions. Laszlo, a chess teacher, exposed his daughters only to men’s competitions and succeeded in getting favourable results.

Garry Kasparov and Bobby Fischer were initiated to chess by their mothers.

In India too, the Khadilkar sisters flourished in the 1970s, underlying the role of family support.

Rohini Khadilkar (5), Jayashree (4) and Vasanthi (1) won the first 10 national women’s titles among themselves. Later, in the 1980s, AS Subbaraman from Chennai gave up his job to help his daughters Vijayalakshmi, Meenakshi and Bhanupriya follow their chess careers.

Vijayalakshmi and Meenakshi are Women’s Grandmasters now.

Today, we have a different generation in which parents are not just following the careers of their children but are even chasing them to the point of putting unnecessary pressure. “Most of them personally interfere with the pairing (who plays who in a chess game which was the arbiter’s job until recently and now the computers do it effortlessly),” says Thipsay.

The former national champion feels parents of successful chess players in India are role models like Susheela. He cites the examples of the fathers of Vijayalakshmi, Sasikiran, Koneru Humpy, Parimarjan Negi and Abhijeet Gupta and mothers of Krittika Nadig, Surya Sekhar Ganguly and Padmini Rout as striking cases of success. The grandparents of Harikrishna and Harika are also in Thipsay’s favourite list.

Next week, we would also get to see a very influential father walking around in Chennai. Henrik Carlsen did not just teach Magnus the chess moves at the age of five but is also a crucial member of his team.