Sultan Khan was born on 13 March 1903 in Mitha Tiwana, Khushab, Sargodha (then British India, today Pakistan), to a Muslim Awan family of pirs and landlords.
He learned Indian chess from his father at the age of nine.
By the time he was 21 he was considered the strongest player in Punjab.
At that time, Sir Umar took him into his household with the idea of teaching him the European version of the game and introducing him to European master chess.
1928
In 1928, he won the all-India championship, scoring eight wins, one draw, and no losses.
1929
In an international chess career of less than five years (1929–33), he won the British Championship three times in four attempts (1929, 1932, 1933), and had tournament and match results that placed him among the top ten players in the world.
Sir Umar then brought him back to his homeland, where he gave up chess and returned to cultivate his ancestral farmlands in the area which became Pakistan.
He lived there before dying in his sixties in the city of Sargodha.
David Hooper and Kenneth Whyld have called him "perhaps the greatest natural player of modern times".
In 2024 FIDE posthumously awarded him the title of Honorary Grandmaster.
In the spring of 1929, Sir Umar took him to London, where a training tournament was organized for his benefit.
Due to his inexperience and lack of theoretical knowledge, he did poorly, tying for last place with H. G. Conde, behind William Winter and Frederick Yates.
After the tournament, Winter and Yates trained with him to help prepare him for the British Chess Championship to be held that summer.
To everyone's surprise, he won.
Soon afterwards, he went back to India with Sir Umar.
1930
Returning to Europe in May 1930, Sultan Khan began an international chess career that included wins over many of the world's leading players.
His best results were second to Savielly Tartakower at Liège 1930; third at Hastings 1930–31 (+5−2=2) behind future World Champion Max Euwe and former World Champion José Raúl Capablanca; fourth at Hastings 1931–32; fourth at Bern 1932 (+10−3=2); and a tie for third with Isaac Kashdan at London 1932, behind World Champion Alexander Alekhine and Salo Flohr.
At Hamburg 1930, there was still no rule that teams must put their best player on the top board, and some teams, unconvinced of his strength, matched their second or even third-best player against him.
He scored nine wins, four draws, and four losses (64.7%).
1931
In matches he narrowly defeated Tartakower in 1931 (+4−3=5) and narrowly lost to Flohr in 1932 (+1−2=3).
Sultan Khan thrice played first board for England at Chess Olympiads.
At Prague 1931, he faced a much stronger field.
He had an outstanding result, scoring eight wins, seven draws, and two losses (67.6%).
This included wins against Flohr and Akiba Rubinstein and draws with Alekhine, Kashdan, Ernst Grünfeld, Gideon Ståhlberg, and Efim Bogolyubov.
1932
Sultan Khan again won the British Championship in 1932 and 1933.
1933
At Folkestone 1933, he had his worst result, an even score, winning four games, drawing six, and losing four.
Once again, his opponents included the world's best players, such as Alekhine, Flohr, Kashdan, Tartakower, Grünfeld, Ståhlberg, and Lajos Steiner.
Reuben Fine wrote of him:
The story of the Indian Sultan Khan turned out to be a most unusual one.
The "Sultan" was not the term of status that we supposed it to be; it was merely a first name.
He spoke English poorly and kept score in Hindustani.
It was said that he could not even read the European notations.
After the tournament [the 1933 Folkestone Olympiad] the American team was invited to the home of Sultan Khan's master in London.
When we were ushered in we were greeted by the maharajah with the remark, "It is an honor for you to be here; ordinarily I converse only with my greyhounds."
Although he was a Mohammedan, the maharajah had been granted special permission to drink intoxicating beverages, and he made liberal use of this dispensation.
He presented us with a four-page printed biography telling of his life and exploits; so far as we could see his greatest achievement was to have been born a maharajah.
In December 1933, Sir Umar took him back to India.
1935
In 1935, he won a match against V. K. Khadilkar, yielding just one draw in ten games.
1966
Sultan Khan (Punjabi and, 1903 – 25 April 1966; often given the erroneous honorific Mir Sultan Khan or Mir Malik Sultan Khan ) was a British Indian Punjabi chess player, and later a citizen of Pakistan, who is thought to have been the strongest chess master of his time from Asia.
The son of a Muslim landlord and preacher, Khan travelled with Colonel Nawab Sir Umar Hayat Khan (Sir Umar), to Britain, where he took the chess world by storm.
