The Queen’s Gambit and the Erasure of Indo-Persian Chess
When The Queen’s Gambit came out, it felt like a breath of fresh air: a stylish, quiet, emotionally tense drama about a young woman trying to carve out her place in a world that constantly underestimates her.
I loved the series. I loved Anya Taylor-Joy’s performance, the aesthetic, the quiet intensity of the matches, and the fact that it placed a woman firmly at the centre of a game so often framed as masculine. And as someone who is autistic myself, there was something deeply familiar in Beth : her focus, her sensory world, her emotional logic. I saw myself in her. But with a bit of distance, I’ve been thinking about the way the show unconsciously participates in a very Western framing of chess.
I’m Indian. I migrated to the West when I was little. Chess was one of the bridges between my dad and me. Something he was passionate about and passed on to me. My relationship with it has always been strange: I adore the game, I know its rhythm, but I never practiced enough to be very good. Still, it’s tied to childhood memories, to language, to home. And so whenever I see chess represented as a fundamentally Western or Western-adjacent pursuit, I feel a small disconnect.
Historically, chess comes from the Indian subcontinent. Most scholars agree it originated as Chaturanga in sixth-century India, before travelling to Persia where it became Chatrang, and later Shatranj after the Arab conquests. From there, it moved through the Islamic world into Europe, where rules, aesthetics and terminology shifted again and again until the game became what we now recognise. It’s a long, multilingual journey, one that is very much rooted in Indo-Persian cultural exchange.
Even the word mate comes from the Persian shāh māt (شاهمات), meaning “the king is helpless” or “the king is defeated”. As the game travelled, the phrase morphed into “checkmate.” And this wasn’t the only transformation: the farzin or ferz piece (originally the counsellor) slowly evolved into the modern “queen,” radically changing its movement and symbolism. These shifts accumulate until the Indo-Farsi core becomes almost invisible.
Then there’s the structure of international championships. The reason so many champions are Western or Russian is not because the talent is inherently there. It’s because resources, training systems and infrastructures are.
It’s telling that India’s first modern Grandmaster, Viswanathan Anand, only emerged in 1988, not because Indians weren’t brilliant players before, but because institutional support simply wasn’t there. Access shapes visibility. Access shapes greatness.
The Queen’s Gambit brought a feminist gaze to chess, which I genuinely loved. But it doesn’t manage to bring an intersectional one. It revived a global love for the game without reviving its origins. And visually, its clean, minimalist, retro-Western aesthetic reinforces that erasure, making chess feel like something born in a white mid-century America instead of something that travelled through India, Persia and the Islamic world. The story is compelling, but the cultural history disappears into the background.
And that’s where my discomfort lies. As an Indian woman, I can relate deeply to Beth as an autistic protagonist. Yet at the same time it feels strange to watch a game so profoundly shaped by Indo-Persian history become fully whitewashed in its popular imagination. Both feelings can coexist : the joy of representation and feminism, and the ache of erasure.
Chess is global. Chess is ours. And I wish the stories we tell about it remembered that too.
