Sultan Khan (chess player)
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, to Britain, where he took the chess world by storm. In an international chess career of less than five years (1929–33), he won the British Championship three times in four attempts, 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.
Sultan Khan with his trophy after winning the British Chess Championship (1932)
Major General Nawab Sir Umar Hayat Khan Tiwana, was a soldier of the Indian Empire, one of the largest landholders in the Punjab, and an elected member of the Council of State of India.
Khan as Assistant Delhi Herald, 1911
Sir Malik Umar Hayat Khan as an Honorary Lieutenant of the 18th King George's Own Lancers, early 20th century (watercolour by Major A.C. Lovett (1862-1919)).