That, Sapre was invited by Russia in 1954 to witness the Vasily Smyslov – Mikhail Botvinnik World Championship match owing to his canny analysis in letters written to Russian magazines, naturally, stumped all of them. But we’ll think a thousand times before dreaming of going out and playing chess internationally,” he confesses. “We’ll have the world champion in carrom. But us folk are hardly ever inclined towards competitive pursuits,” Bhide says. Just 2-3 hours away, Kolhapur boasts of sportsmen in different disciplines. “Us people from Konkan are very risk-averse and too conventional. Lokmanya Tilak traced his roots back to this place and launched his feisty thoughts into a fiery orbit from Ratnagiri, but as such, there was nothing in the sleepy hamlet’s environment where learning Sanskrit shlokas was the pinnacle of aspiration – and with no history or pedigree in the sport – that could point a boy in the general direction of chess. What Ratnagiri remains astonished by is how one amongst them nurtured an ambition so vastly larger than the city’s typical trait of sticking to the beaten path – formal education followed by vocational employment.
As the eponymous tournament kicked off in Ratnagiri, it was another opportunity to understand a man, ahead of his times in gaining mastery over chess, whose lifelong obsession with the game was pivotal to how future Indians learnt the sport.
Leafing through the pages, one attempts to pull out of obscurity those snapshots of a life that was barely known beyond a small circle. A multi-lingual book titled Ramchandra Sapre: Buddhibalacha Raja, put together by his eldest daughter Shubhangi Pol stocks some of the best memories, pooled in together by speaking to his associates, friends and family. RBS was first national joint-champion with Dharbha Venkayya at Eluru, AP in 1955 at age 40, but he first played the game drawing a board on the floor of the front yard and with pieces chiselled out of wooden twigs and dipped in ink. Taluka in Ratnagiri and where he picked his first pieces of chess in the late 1920s.
We didn’t even know that he was India’s first national champion,” Bhide says, even as he takes a breather from organising the city’s first national-level meet this weekend (28-29 November), hoping to replant the lost legacy of Sapre who spent a few schooling years in Kondhan village of Sangameshwar “There was a lot of romanticism to that story that someone who had grown up in Ratnagiri could’ve gone to Russia 60 years back. Still, as the inaugural national Correspondence Chess champion (he participated actively since 1948), around the same time that he became India’s first joint National champion across a real checkered board in 1955, chess wafted through Sapre’s life like a meticulously stirred slow cook.īhide, in Ratnagiri as part of the organisation Chessmen Ratnagiri a few years ago, had only heard of the name RBS in speeches by old-timers - a vaguely renowned board player who had once gone to that faraway behemoth of chess excellence, Russia. Reciprocations of an imminent Nf6 to c4 would arrive on a postcard, to kickstart a to-and-fro conversation that in Correspondence chess could go on for as long as twelve months till the vanquished resigned or the winner was determined. Largely unheard of beyond the chess circles, Sapre lived in chess’ quaintest era. In the mystical age when RB Sapre had hopelessly fallen in love with chess, an e4 could take a couple of days to draw out the first response: an impending c5. Had he been around, India’s first national champion Ramchandra Sapre, whose memory was being commemorated in his centenary year with a tournament in Ratnagiri, would have been thrilled at how technology had made this prompt back-and-forth possible. When Chaitanya Bhide sent out the first intimation of the RB Sapre Memorial chess tournament inviting entries on a WhatsApp group, he could see the beginnings of a response form on the screen of his phone in the immediate seconds that followed.
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