Be afraid of being unaware, because the lack of knowledge of possibilities can keep you ridden to a life that is tiring and depleting. Imagine you enter a small, dark room. You can not see anything and the only thing available is one bottle of liquid. You will keep on drinking it, hoping it will quench your thirst. However, soon someone steps up and opens the door of the room for you, handing you a fresh bottle of water. Now, you will realise the importance of clean and quenching water, appreciating it more. The case is something similar to light and right guidance in life. You keep on trudging down a path, until someone shines a light and shows you the right one.For a group of alcohol addicts in the Marottichal village of the Thrissur district of Kerala, that light arrived in the form of Charaliyil Unnikrishnan. In the village with 6,000 residents, when you enter a teahouse, there is a crowd around a table. Phones, wallets, and tea cups are all set aside as two people engage in a game of chess and the crowd gathers to watch avidly. While one of them could be an older player, another could be a teenager venturing into the game with a blindfold on his eyes, which makes him visualise the board and his moves, upping the stakes.
Inside India’s chess village
It was in the early 2000s, that Marottichal came to be known as the ‘Chess Village of India’ because at least one person in every household here is believed to be chess-proficient. Outside grocery shops, under the shade of a tree and on bus stops, you can find two at a game at any time and place in the village.Gowrishankar Jayaraj, one of the players from the village, ranked in India’s top 600 active chess players in February 2025, as per the World Chess Federation (FIDE). He also received the FIDE Candidate Master (CM) title in the same year.Like him, many chess grandmasters are in training in this small village. However, the bright and futuristic present comes after a dark and scary past.
A guiding light
About four decades ago, the entire village of Marottichal was gripped by an alcohol addiction and gambling crisis that was pushing many families to the verge of ruin.Back in the 1970s, three Marottichal households were brewing nut-based alcohol for personal consumption. But by the early 80s, the village had become a regional hub for illicit alcohol production. “People weren’t just drinking, they were brewing and selling liquor in their houses every night,” said Jayaraj Manazhy, a resident of the village to Al Jazeera.Soon, farming families began to neglect their livestock and crops. With diminishing resources lost in card games, income decreased and addiction increased. “Young children were left without clothes to wear and others were starving,” said another local.That, was until Charaliyil Unnikrishnan, a local resident turned exile returned to Marottichal in the late 1980s. Unnikrishnan had been shunned by his family for joining a Maoist movement in his youth. He gave up the movement and returned to the village to set up a teahouse in the heart of it.However, the influence of alcohol on his village, troubled the rebel and thus, he decided to act. Unnikrishnan soon assembled a small group of friends whom he had known from his teenage years in the village and began networking with the wives and mothers of the liquor producers who were angry at their sons and husbands for spearheading production.Over the course of the months, the group would receive tip-offs and raid the houses where alcohol was being produced and stored. After the raids, Unnikrishnan would invite members of the community to play chess. “The game brought us together. We started talking about it more and more, and people would meet to play rather than drink,” says John, who secured funding from other villages to create regional tournaments and successfully campaigned for chess to become part of the curriculum in both the lower and upper primary schools in the village.At his shop, Unnikrishnan served the villagers not just tea, but also a future and vision that was alcohol and addiction-free. Soon, people engrossed in a game of chess were common in the village while the number of alcohol addicts decreased in the village. Unnikrishnan taught chess to almost 1,000 villagers and has himself competed against grandmasters internationally. Several young players from Marottichal are competing internationally and within India regularly.In 2016, Marottichal was awarded a Universal Asian Record by the Universal Records Forum for the greatest number of amateur competitors (1,001) playing chess concurrently in Asia.The tale reached so far and wide that in 2023, Marottichal’s redemption attracted the attention of filmmaker and writer Kabeer Khurana who directed a 35-minute film, The Pawn of Marottichal, recounting the village’s struggle from addiction to recovery.
