The Origins of Chess in India

Chaturanga and the four divisions

Chaturanga took shape in northern India by around the sixth century CE. Its name refers to the four divisions of a classical Indian army — infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariots — and those four arms became the pieces we still use: the pawn, the knight, the bishop, and the rook.

The game was played on the ashtapada, an eight-by-eight board that already existed for other games. Alongside the four divisions stood the raja and his counsellor, ancestors of the king and queen.

From dice to pure skill

A four-handed variant, chaturaji, used dice to determine which piece a player could move. The two-player form abandoned them, and that abandonment is arguably the single most important decision in the game's history: it left a contest with no hidden information and no luck, where the result belongs entirely to the players.

Chaturanga is the earliest known game to give different pieces different powers and to end on the fate of one particular piece. Every later version of chess is a modification of those two ideas rather than a departure from them.

The journey west

Trade and diplomacy carried the game from India into Sassanid Persia, where it was renamed chatrang and then, after the Islamic conquests, shatranj. It is that Persian form, not the Indian one, that eventually reached Europe.