Patiently perched over a drilling machine, Baljit Singh picks tiny, polished wooden chunks and begins, with utmost nonchalance, to carve them into the trickiest chess piece there is to craft: the knight.
This no-frills facility in a bustling Amritsar lane is far removed from the glitzy arena in Singapore which hosted the World Chess Championship between D Gukesh and Ding Liren. But it’s here that the pieces for the historic match that saw the 18-year-old Indian being crowned as the youngest world champion were produced — like they have been for World Chess Championships for over a decade.
Baljit is among the select few carvers tasked with this painstaking work. His job is among the toughest and most specialised. In fact, he is one of only two craftsmen in the world entrusted with carving the knight for the world championship sets. With their fine detailing, odd shapes and flourishes, knights are the trickiest chess pieces to carve.
Baljit is among the select few carvers tasked with this painstaking work. His job is among the toughest and most specialised. (Namit Kumar)
It’s a piece of trivia that doesn’t excite him, however. The Amritsar resident, who began working in the wood-carving industry 34 years ago, says he is aware that the pieces he crafts are used for big matches only because of the media attention on his work.
“I’ve been doing this work since 1990, so naturally, I’ve produced a lot of pieces. My team and I produce about 40 knights a week, for many sets in many designs, so I can’t keep track of the final use of each one of them,” he says.
But Aditya Chopra, the owner of Chopra Chess where Baljit works, can’t hide his excitement. “I was following the championship and cheering for Gukesh,” he says.
“I thought he may even wrap it up sooner. Of course, I was happy to see an Indian win the championship using the sets that we have produced,” adds Chopra, whose firm exports chess sets around the world, and has been producing sets for the World Championship since 2012.
When global chess’s governing body, FIDE, sold the World Championship’s rights to Andrew Paulson in 2011, the American entrepreneur revamped the event by engaging the services of the design firm Pentagram.
Pentagram, in turn, commissioned Argentine architect, Daniel Weil, to redesign the playing environment, which included the chess sets.
That Weil’s vision — of reinventing the Staunton Chess Set, first designed in 1849, to give the contest greater theatricality — came together in a mom-and-pop store in Amritsar because of low manufacturing costs is one of the many peculiar elements of today’s globalised trade.
Of course, Amritsar’s predisposition as a chess manufacturing hub, which began with the ivory trade in the 19th century and continues with artisanal woodworking in the 21st century, came into play too.
“My father started this business. Being in this industry, when he travelled abroad he realised that there would be great demand for Indian chess sets because these were made of wood, while other sets were mainly plastic, or in the case of pricier ones, made of marble. That’s how this started. Back then, it was not an organised sector, so we streamlined the process, got a small factory started and made the crafters experts in making one particular piece out of the six. That business has gone on for three decades,” says Chopra.
His company has been employed to manufacture sets for the World Championship ever since the Pentagram redesign of 2012. Some of Chopra’s pieces, he says, were even used in the popular Netflix series ‘The Queen’s Gambit’.
The process, from trees to the board, is time-consuming, expensive and requires the kind of precision that only specialised expertise can produce. Four types of wood — boxwood (papdi), red padauk, acacia, and ebony — are stored and aged in a warehouse, for months, to dry out. The wood is then brought to an assembly line in the Amritsar factory, where it is cleaned, cut, shaped, polished and then hand-carved.
The artisans are trained in the craft for months, and some experts like Baljit continue to learn and relearn their craft due to innovations and designs. It is in that context that the making of the knight requires such precision: each element of the piece is intentional, from the expression it must convey, to the shape of its mane.
If there is any imprecision in any piece, not just the knight, it must be thrown out because it ruins the set’s uniformity. This requirement for accuracy increases while manufacturing sets for the World Championship, given how the smallest of details can impact gameplay.
On Friday morning, Chopra opened the newspapers and took pictures of the clippings on Gukesh’s win to send to his factory manager with the caption: “our sets”. Currently, he says, luxury sets of the kind that his company mainly manufactures don’t see the same demand in India that they do abroad — even India’s recent chess boom has been powered by online gameplay and streaming. But he hopes that Gukesh’s victory will change that.
“After that (Gukesh’s victory), I’m excited about where this game will go (in India). So many young Indian players are emerging on the global stage and I expect a demand for sets across the country, across sizes and scales, even in schools and at the local level,” he says, bullish about the future in a way that an 18-year-old’s history-making triumph is likely to make one feel.
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