Vijayalakshmi Subbaraman
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A profile
Sep 3, 2023: The Times of India
➤ Ten years before R Praggnanandhaa was born, his hometown saw fivetime national women’s champion, Bhagyashree Thipsay blundering away a pawn to a calm, confident 16-year-old commerce student fondly known as Viji.
➤ Vijayalakshmi Subbaraman was a teenager yearning for a ‘laptop-computer’ in 1995 when that win against Thipsay — her sixth straight victory in the Asian Zonal championship — earned her the headline-grabbing title of International Woman Master and, eventually, IBM’s latest notebook computer. ➤ But the moment that would reduce her coach-cum-father, Subbaraman, to tears, arrived five years later in 2000, a decade after an 18-year-old named Viswanathan Anand became India’s first grandmaster, 21-year-old Viji drew a match against a male player to be declared India’s first woman grandmaster (WGM). “The title had eluded me for long,” she tells us. “I missed it almost 20 times, sometimes by a point or half a point.”
➤ Born in 1979 Madras, Viji started learning chess from her father, Subbaraman, at age three and a half when the various athletics and tennis coaches they approached deemed her too young for training. “So my father decided to get me a chess board. And he learnt the game and taught me how to play,” recalls Viji about the late Subbaraman — then an assistant engineer at Pallavan Transport Corporation — who took her to Chennai’s famous Tal Chess Club when she was five. “There, I saw very big chess boards and coins and people playing with a chess clock for the first time,” says Viji. “That’s when my journey began.”
➤ Over the years, even as he accompanied her to the various national sub-junior tournaments, Subbaraman became more of a coach than a father. “If I played a bad game and won, I used to get scolded. If I played a good game and lost, he used to appreciate me. He wasn’t bothered about the results. I just had to make sure I played a good game. I owe every part of my career to him,” says Viji about the disciplinarian who also inducted her younger sisters — Meenakshi and Banupriya — into this world of chess.
➤ Their rise brought to mind Hungary’s legendary Polgar sisters — Judit, Susan and Sofia — and Bombay’s famous Khadilkar sisters — Vasanthi, Jayshree and Rohini — whose respective passionate fathers encouraged them to break sturdy 70s and 1980s glass ceilings.
➤ Her ability to “concentrate on the board even if a bomb was exploding near me” turned the “caustic comments” that used to follow her games against male players into white noise. “Many of my wins were termed as ‘lucky’ or ‘by fluke’. But when they (men) were playing against me and when they used to lose, these comments used to vanish. So, I never really let these things bother me,” says Viji who scored memorable victories over male players including Grandmaster Plaskett of England whom she stunned in a tournament in Calcutta.
➤“I would prefer to clinch my WGM in the men’s tournament,” Viji had said before going on to draw a match with P Harikrishna to leap into history as the nation’s first WGM. Months later, Viji surprised herself by becoming the first woman to win India a silver medal at the Chess Olympiad in Istanbul. Her FIDE rating soared quickly, achieving its peak at 2487. “At one point, I was world number seven or eleven, I think,” says Viji, who watched her sister, Meenakshi, become a WGM four years later.
➤ Today, nearly a quarter of a century since she paved the way for names such as Koneru Humpy and Harika Dronavalli, India has found its 25th and youngest female grandmaster in Savitha Shri. “I don’t want to change a thing about my career, be it the victories or the losses,” she says, in hindsight. “The losses were very painful but they made me who I am.” Her father would be pleased.
Curated by Ketaki Desai, with inputs from Amulya Gopalakrishnan and Sharmila Ganesan Ram
