Goofy and gritty, how Divya Deshmukh became India’s golden girl

The 12-year-old is then asked about her fighting skills on the chessboard, how she is not afraid of any opponent and told that if it’s a high-stakes game, she inevitably ends up winning it. “That may be true,” she says.

Throughout a heady July, Deshmukh, now 19, summoned those fighting skills and faced off against veritable giants of the sport — World No 6 Zhu Jiner, veteran grandmaster Harika Dronavalli, former women’s world champion Tan Zhongyi and, finally, Indian chess’ original woman prodigy, Koneru Humpy — on her way to winning the FIDE Women’s World Cup title. This, despite starting the event as only the 15th-best-rated player in the field. In winning the World Cup, she also became India’s fourth woman to become a grandmaster.

“I think the younger me knew what she was talking about,” Deshmukh told FIDE, the international chess governing body, in an interview after winning the World Cup title when reminded about the interview from seven years ago. “If you ask me that question today (about her fighting skills and how she is not afraid of any opponent), I would probably repeat my answer,” she said.

That seven-year-old prophecy announced by the clickbaity headline of a YouTube video came true in Georgia, a country that has produced some of the world’s earliest trailblazers of women’s chess, like Nona Gaprindashvili and Maia Chiburdanidze.

“My turn,” she wrote on Instagram in a caption of a photo posing with the trophy.

Heady 13 months

In the last 13 months, the girl from Nagpur has become a world junior champion, helped the Indian women’s team win the Chess Olympiad gold medal and now finally claimed a World Cup gold, while also becoming a grandmaster.

What was remarkable about Deshmukh becoming a grandmaster was that, unlike the 87 Indians before her, she earned the title in a single tournament. In fact, before the World Cup started, Deshmukh hadn’t earned any of the three norms a player needs to become a grandmaster. She came to Batumi hoping to collect one norm. “My goals changed today,” she said in the FIDE interview. “Time to find new goals.” In the past, some grandmasters have earned their three norms in the span of months fuelled by a hot streak of form. Others have laboured for years to collect the norms. By winning the title, she bypassed that conventional route entirely.

Deshmukh rarely does conventional.

For example, she does not shirk away from playing in mixed tournaments — events where there are male and female players on the same battlefield. This year itself, she’s played in two such tournaments — Tata Steel Challengers at Wijk aan Zee and Prague Challengers. Other women players occasionally play in a mixed event, but it’s rare. At Wijk aan Zee at the start of the year, Deshmukh was accompanied by three more women in the field, including Vaishali. There, Deshmukh beat a strong male GM from Turkey, Ediz Gurel (rated 2624 at the time while Deshmukh was 2490). At Prague, she was the only woman in the 10-player field where she beat a grandmaster (Stamatis Kourkoulos-Arditis). Both events were humbling experiences for her: she lost eight out of 13 games at Wijk and had five defeats in nine games at Prague.

“These tournaments, all the struggles and being beaten left to right, I think that has definitely helped me to become what I am,” she said before adding: “Playing in these events, there’s a lot less pressure. I enjoy those tournaments more. They help me realise what my weaknesses are. When you play against opponents that are considerably stronger than you, you learn so much.”

Women’s chess is ruled by a ruthless, give-no-quarter ethos. That’s why, unlike male players, you almost never see two women players sit and discuss the game to pick their opponent’s mind once the match ends. Handshakes before games are actually just two sets of fingers making bare-minimum contact with the coiled tension of boxers touching gloves before a prizefight. There’s no eye contact between opponents whatsoever.

Goofy Deshmukh

Divya Deshmukh would apologise to the inanimate objects like the chess pieces and the match clock after accidentally knocking them over. (Photo credit: Anna Shtourman/FIDE)

In this mix enters the endearingly goofy Deshmukh. And stands out.

She’ll apologise to the inanimate objects like the chess pieces and the match clock after accidentally knocking them over. She’ll occasionally flash a wide smile at the camera even if there are just seconds left before the start of a crucial game, which is usually that time when the players are in their meditative zones, their faces as poker-faced as the wooden pieces on the board they’re about to command into battle.

Deshmukh is — there is no better word to describe it — chill, in a sport where many players can come across as deathly serious, impassive, restrained and bashful. She’s so quick-witted and has such charisma in interviews that she’s among those rare athletes who can be — and has been — asked about her fashion sense at chess games besides being asked borderline silly questions about why she brought a banana with her to every single game at the FIDE World Cup and never once took a bite of it.

Her bubbly, extroverted personality is the perfect foil for the assassin that she is on the chessboard. Talk to anyone in the sport who has known her, and they will praise her aggression on the board.

“If you look at the approach she played with Humpy, it was so aggressive. She tried to dominate Humpy in a way,” pointed out Kushager Krishnater, who despite being in Team Humpy as a second (an aide) since 2022, could not help but marvel at Deshmukh’s ambition. “If you look at Game 1 and Game 2 of the World Cup final, Divya was the one who was pressing in very slow positions even when there was no chance of a result. Even in the first game of the tie-break (after the two classical games ended in draws), she did that. You don’t do it against somebody who is stronger than you! A player does this when they think that their opponent is weaker than you. If you look at Divya’s reaction after the first classical game against Humpy ended in a draw, she was visibly a bit angry with herself. That is not something you fake. So to believe that you are better than one of the best chess players in the world and that you could try and dominate her goes on to show how confident she is and how much ambition she has.”

Divya Deshmukh’s bubbly, extroverted personality is the perfect foil for the assassin that she is on the chessboard. (Photo credit: Anna Shtourman/FIDE)

Here’s just a little slice of what transpired in the final between Deshmukh and Humpy. There was a moment when five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand was on commentary and in the middle game, he said that a draw was coming. Then, when both players continued extending the game, trying to squeeze water out of stone, Anand got a little irritated, remarking: “For some reason instead of repeating (the moves and ending the game as a draw) they keep changing. Why is Divya changing moves? Just repeat! I don’t know what they want. Do they really believe they can do something here, because I don’t even see how to play for a win if you want to.”

Before the final, Anand had explained to The Indian Express how Deshmukh “leaned towards playing aggressive chess”.

Coach RB Ramesh, who has shaped the careers of players like Praggnanandhaa and Vaishali and also trained Deshmukh in her formative years, told The Indian Express: “Divya is the most confident girl from the lot. As a young girl too she didn’t have that negative side to her: the one that tends to create self-doubt. That inner chatter that wrecks things, fortunately, was missing in her.”

Grandmaster Abhijit Kunte, who has worked extensively with Deshmukh, added: “It never looked as if she’s playing the finals or semi-finals or quarter-finals for the first time. She always showed that she was eager to win the match.”

Strong psychology

Kunte was the captain of the Indian women’s team at the Chess Olympiad last year where they claimed the first-ever team gold in the most prestigious team event in the sport. Deshmukh claimed an individual gold too. Kunte said that before the tournament began, he had told the teenager that since she was in great form, she would have to play in all 11 rounds for India, while others were being substituted. Deshmukh agreed without a moment’s pause.

“She has very strong psychology. Many players, when they’re under pressure, they break. Some players don’t convert their advantage. But she’s not like that. When she’s under pressure, she will make sure that she defends very tenuously,” Kunte said. “At the same time, when she feels she is better, she will keep the advantage with her. She’s very clever that way when she’s playing chess.”

In an interview with The Indian Express in 2023 after winning the title at the Tata Steel Chess India’s rapid tournament in Kolkata, Deshmukh had mentioned that while she is inspired by many players like Humpy and Anand, she doesn’t really have any ‘role models’. She also admitted that she wasn’t certain she wanted to pursue chess full-time and that she was ‘still exploring’ if she wanted to focus full-time on chess or on further studies.

“What stood out about Divya was her ability to strike a balance between academics and chess,” Anju Bhutani, former principal and current academic co-ordinator with the management at Bhavan’s Bhagwandas Purohit Vidya Mandir where Deshmukh studied told The Indian Express. “Even while competing in tournaments, she never neglected her studies. She did well in her exams, submitted her assignments on time, and always remained grounded despite winning big titles. Each time she returned after a win, she would quietly come and stand outside my cabin with her trophy. She didn’t speak much, but she would come in, give a quick hug and click a picture together.”

Now, as chess seems to have taken over, Deshmukh said she admires the current world no 1 from China Hou Yifan, who has won the women’s world championship multiple times. Why? Because Hou won everything there was on offer in chess, then branched out into academics, earning a master’s degree at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and then started working at Shenzhen University.

While most grandmasters from India her age like world champion Gukesh and Praggnanandhaa started focussing solely on chess from a very early age, Deshmukh still harbours hope that one day the world of academics will open a portal into a different universe for her.

Since the pandemic, the tectonic plates under chess have shifted as the sport has experienced tremors of an Indian earthquake.

On the men’s side, world champion Gukesh, Praggnanandhaa and Arjun Erigaisi are flagbearers of this golden generation, a trio capable of beating the world’s best. With Gukesh already winning the world championship, there is hope that his opponent next year could be an Indian as well. On the women’s side, this India vs India battle for the top prize — a true indicator of dominance in a sport — has already come true when Humpy played Deshmukh at the World Cup. The sight of two Indian women fighting for the title, while two Chinese players fought for the third place spot could be a turn-of-the-page moment for women’s chess, which has so far been dominated by players from Russia and China. At the forefront of this is the 19-year-old once proclaimed the ‘future of Indian chess’.

That future is here. As Deshmukh wrote in her two-word mission statement on Instagram, it’s now her turn.

(With inputs from Ankita Deshkar)