Premchand’s “The Chess Players” is a brief portrait of Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Raushan Ali, two Lucknowi nobles who pass their days disengaged from everything but the chess games they share. While the political conditions that sustain their status are being put to an end by the British East India Company, they simply go here and there to play chess, never lifting a finger to do anything about it. They eventually find themselves drinking and playing in a disintegrating mosque — Premchand wasn’t too subtle in his satire there — where they have a dispute about the game and kill each other.
In my eyes, if there is any portion of Satyajit Ray’s adaptation, Shatranj Ke Khilari, that matches the feel of Premchand’s original story, it’s the opening scene. I don’t mean this in a normative way — I’m not suggesting that the rest of the film should have been anything else or that it was a good thing that it opened as it did. In adapting Premchand’s brief story into a full-length feature film, Satyajit Ray had to take some creative liberties: Premchand’s 10 pages couldn’t be translated beat-by-beat into two hours of film.
That digression aside, the film opens with a chess board at the center of the frame, suspended in darkness that is broken only by the poised hands of the characters moving the pieces. It is only the second shot that reveals their bodies and faces, with the chess board still in the center. Everything else is still suspended in darkness. From the darkness, a servant emerges for a moment. The chess board remains the center. In brief but evocative free verse, a narrator portrays their the protagonists' disconnection from reality.
Premchand’s writing operates in a very similar way to this opening sequence. A third person narrator furnishes the reader’s imagination with all the context needed in evocative yet plain language: “All eyes were dimmed with the intoxication of luxury. No one had any awareness of what was going on in the world” (182). At the most poignant of times, Premchand is willing to indulge in a more literary register: “The broken archways of the ruins, the crumbling walls and the dusty minarets looked down upon the corpses and mourned” (192). These sorts of moments are secondary, though, to the register in which most of the text is written: simple prose about happenings and dialogue. It is plainly focused on the actions and feelings of the characters. Satyajit Ray’s translation of this in the opening sequence takes the function of those few lines dedicated to furnishing the reader’s imagination on everything absent from the chess game. It does this in a disembodied auditory dimension that is alienated from the visual experience. The visual experience, like the remainder of Premchand’s prose, is bare. It feels liminal. But, of course, the knowledge the reader has makes them incredulous at this liminality: why are the characters suspended in this in-between world? Why is a chess board the center of this world?! This is an absurd indulgence that they cannot afford! Satyajit Ray embodies the experience of reading the trivial and detached interactions between Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Raushan Ali by visually representing them in a world that is entirely dark except for the chess board, an absence made heavy by a narrator that implies what the space ought to contain.
Unlike Premchand’s short, Satyajit Ray’s adaptation includes Wajid Ali Shah (Sultan of Lucknow) as a character. There’s one moment in which his advisors bring him existentially pressing news. He is incapable of responding in the same language of frank urgency. Instead, he sings a solemn ghazal. Satyajit Ray’s translation of Premchand — a writer of prose in a time when such flexible and vernacular forms were new — has arguably the most strikingly inept and detached utterance come in an ancient, highly structured poetic form. In Ray's adaptation of Premchand's work, meter is as much of an indulgence as Mirza Sahib and Mir Sahib’s chess game: detached, ancient structures that should be switched for prose.