“The Chess Players is a masque of a film, in which every gesture, every detail of dress or habitation, is intended to delight your eye; where voices are as sonorous as the music that surrounds the action and emotions are restrained....” --Robert Hatch, The Nation.
“Satyajit Ray's first film with Hindi and English dialogue, The Chess Players, is his most ambitious film and his first historical picture. It is based on Munshi Premchand's 10-page short story of two Nawabs, Mirza and Meer, chess addicts in pleasure-bent, voluptuous Lucknow. So obsessed are they with their daily contests of playing at battles that they neglect their wives and remain oblivious of the hint that their musician-poet king, Wajid Ali Shah, is the latest target in the East India Company's political chess game of ‘take over' of Indian monarchies to enlarge the sphere of British influence and add financial profit. As John Company's troops move in for this annexation, the chess addicts quarrel and kill one another. On this briefest of stories focused on the Nawabs, Ray builds his historical scenario with action on three interconnecting levels. A Narrator, plus sequences animating historical material, link together the central theme of the chess players with the political chess game of the East India Company to force the abdication of the unfortunate king, Wajid, immersed in his artistic pursuits.... While The Chess Players includes many sequences in the most gorgeous colour and is very beautiful, it remains essentially a moving portrayal of historic events because all the characters are of human dimensions. Through the fictitious figures of the two ordinary, rather silly Nawabs, the viewer is given the flavour of a society in decline.” --Marie Seton