‘England’s top female chess player’: Rishi Sunak praises Indian-born Bodhana Sivanandan World News

British politician, former British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak Congratulations to Bodhana Sivanandan, an 11-year-old boy of Indian origin on X on April 3, 2026. Harrow’s Sivanandan recently emerged as England’s top female chess player.“Warm congratulations to Bodhana Sivanandan for becoming England’s top female chess player at just 11 years old,” he wrote. “We used to play in Downing Street Gardens,” he shared, while adding that Sivanandan’s success was not a shock.

Who is Boudhana Sivanandan?

Bodhana Sivanandan was born in London on March 7, 2015, to parents who moved to the UK from Tiruchirappalli in 2007. She was recently ranked 72nd in the International Chess Federation’s global women’s rankings. She is England’s highest-rated female chess player with a rating of 2,366. By securing the position, the teenager replaces 25-year-old Lan Yao who previously held the position.Sivanandan was just five years old when he fell in love with the sport. It was during the pandemic that she discovered a chess board that had belonged to her father, which he had planned to donate to charity. “I said it was a game but she didn’t believe me, so I had to put on a YouTube video to explain. Then she asked about the rules – I only knew the very, very basics,” her father, an IT professional, told The Times. “Slowly, her interest got better and better, and she started playing better, so we played more and more chess.”At the age of 7, Sivanandan competed in the 2022 European Schools Championships, winning all 24 matches and claiming three gold medals. In 2023, her rating exceeded 2,000 and she won the official female candidate master title from FIDE. In 2024, she was selected for the Hungarian Chess Olympiad, setting a record as the youngest player to represent England in any sport. A year later, she became the youngest female chess player to defeat a grandmaster when she defeated 60-year-old Peter Wells at the British Chess Championship in Liverpool in August 2025.Currently a sixth-grade student, she hopes to become the youngest grandmaster in history. However, Sivandam followed in the footsteps of the British chess prodigy and rose to prominence in the board gaming world. In 2024, 15-year-old Shreyas Royal became the UK’s youngest-ever grandmaster, and 12-year-old Supratit Banerjee was recently promoted to Grandmaster.