Sitting patiently at the drilling machine, Baljeet Singh selects small, polished pieces of wood and very nonchalantly begins to carve them into the most difficult chess piece to craft: the Knight.
Located on bustling Amritsar Lane, this no-frills facility is a far cry from Singapore’s glitzy arena that hosted the World Chess Championship between D Gukesh and Ding Liren. But it is here that the pieces for the historic match that saw an 18-year-old Indian crowned as the youngest world champion – as they have been for the World Chess Championship for more than a decade.
Baljeet is one of the select few carvers responsible for this painstaking work. His work is one of the hardest and most expert. In fact, he is one of only two craftsmen in the world entrusted with carving knights for World Championship sets. With their fine detail, unique shapes and flourishes, knights are among the most difficult chess pieces to carve.
Baljeet is one of the select few carvers responsible for this painstaking work. His work is one of the hardest and most expert. (Namit Kumar)
It’s this piece of trivia that doesn’t excite him, though. The Amritsar resident, who started working in the woodcarving industry 34 years ago, says he knows his pieces are being used for big games because of the media attention his work has received.
“I’ve been doing this since 1990, so naturally, I’ve produced a lot of pieces. My team and I produce about 40 nites a week, for multiple sets in multiple designs, so I can’t keep track of the end use of each one of them,” he says. says
But Aditya Chopra, owner of Chopra Chess, where Baljeet worked, could not hide his excitement. He says, ‘I was following the championship and cheering for Gukesh.
“I thought he would wrap it up quickly. Of course, I was happy to see an Indian winning the championship using the sets we produced,” adds Chopra, whose company exports chess sets worldwide and has been producing sets for world championships since 2012.
When FIDE, the governing body of world chess, sold the rights to the World Championship to Andrew Paulson in 2011, the American entrepreneur rebuilt the event by engaging the services of design firm Pentagram.
Pentagram, in turn, commissioned Argentinian architect, Daniel Weil, to redesign the game’s environment, which included chess sets.
That Weil’s vision – to reinvent the Staunton chess set, first designed in 1849, to provide more drama to the competition – is among the most distinctive elements of today’s globalization due to low production costs in a mom-and-pop store in Amritsar. be one business
Of course, Amritsar’s pre-eminence as a center of chess production, beginning with the ivory trade in the 19th century and continuing into the 21st century with artisanal woodwork, also came into play.
“My father started this business. After staying in this industry and going abroad, he realized that there was a huge demand for Indian chess sets because they were made of wood, while other sets were mainly made of plastic or, if expensive, made of marble. That’s how it started. It was not an organized sector at the time, so we streamlined the process, started a small factory and specialized artisans in making one of six unique pieces. That business has been running for three decades,’ says Chopra.
His company has been working on building sets for the World Championships since the 2012 Pentagram redesign. Some of Chopra’s pieces, he says, were also used in the popular Netflix series ‘The Queen’s Gambit’.
The tree-to-board process is time-consuming, expensive and requires the kind of precision that only specialized expertise can produce. Four types of wood – boxwood (papadi), red padauk, acacia and ebony – are stored in warehouses and dried for months. The wood is then brought to an assembly line at the Amritsar factory, where it is cleaned and cut, shaped, polished and then carved by hand.
Artisans are trained in the craft for months, and some experts like Baljeet continue to learn and relearn their craft because of innovations and designs. It is in that context that Knight’s creations require such precision: every element of the piece is intentional, it must be expressed through expression, in its supposed shape.
If there is any ambiguity in any piece, not just the knight, it should be thrown out because it spoils the uniformity of the set. This need for precision increases when building sets for the World Championships, given how small details can affect gameplay.
On Friday morning, Chopra opened the newspapers and sent pictures of clippings on Gukesh’s victory to his factory manager with the caption: “Our sets”. Currently, he says, the kind of luxury sets his company mainly produces don’t see the same demand in India as they do abroad — India’s recent chess boom has also been driven by online gameplay and streaming. But he believes that the victory of Gukesh will change that.
“After (Gukesh’s win) I am excited to see where this game will go (in India). “So many young Indian players are emerging on the global stage and I expect demand for sets across the country, in size and scale, at school and local level as well,” he says, excited about the future as an 18-year-old’s history-making victory is likely to make one feel.
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