The Kerala Village That Beat Alcoholism With a Chessboard

At the foot of the Western Ghats mountains, in the Thrissur district of Kerala, sits Marottichal, a village of about 6,000 people where the most common way to spend a free hour is over a chessboard. More than 4,500 residents of the village, or roughly three in four, play, and play well. Most households have at least one strong player. You could knock on almost any door and find someone ready for a game. Since the early 2000s the place has had a nickname: India’s Chess Village.

A village that brewed its own trouble

The tables once held something else. In the 1970s a few households began brewing liquor from local nuts. By the early 1980s the village had become a regional hub for illicit alcohol, and card gambling came with it. Farmers let their crops and livestock slide. Money that could have fed families went to bottles and betting instead. Families fell into poverty, and children went without.

The turn came from one returning resident. Charaliyil Unnikrishnan, known to everyone as Unnikrishnan, came back to Marottichal and opened a teahouse. He taught chess to his customers as a healthier way to fill the hours they had been giving to drink and cards. By his account he taught around a thousand villagers himself, one board at a time. From there it spread person to person, house to house, until it was simply what people did.

Why the board took hold

Chess asked for a person’s full attention, and for a second person across the table. An evening at the board was an evening spent thinking, and spent in company. Francis Kachapilly, who used to drink, said chess “gave us something new.”

For some the change went further than an evening. Jayem Vallur, who is about 59, was in a motorcycle crash that, by his account, doctors said had badly damaged his brain. He credits the game with helping him rebuild his cognitive function.

A village of players

What began in a teahouse is now part of the village’s routines. Chess sits in the local primary-school curriculum, a subject like reading and arithmetic, so children grow up with it. In 2016 the village set a Universal Asian Record when 1,001 players sat down to compete at the same time. There is a village chess association, and its president is Baby John.

Some players are rising well beyond Marottichal. Gowrishankar Jayaraj, 15, is ranked among the roughly 600 top active players in India by the international chess federation, FIDE. He learned the game in a place where nearly everyone around him plays, and now competes against the strongest players in the country.

The BBC profiled the village in 2017. Al Jazeera reported from it in 2025, and found the boards still out.

A single board on a teahouse table gave people a different thing to reach for. Enough of them reached for it that the once-liquor hub became the chess village, its evenings spent across the board from a neighbor.