Aarav Dengla, a 17-year-old from Mumbai, has become India's 93rd chess Grandmaster and the city's third, achieving the title on February 28, 2026, by securing his final GM norm and reaching a live classical rating of 2506 in Bosnia and Herzegovina tournaments. He is the second Indian GM of 2026, following Aaryan Varshney in January.
Mumbai's Aarav Dengla fulfilled the Grandmaster criteria by winning consecutive tournaments: the GM Mix Bijeljina 2026 (7/9, performance rating 2630, undefeated with wins over GMs Alija Muratovic and Miloje Ratkovic) and the GM i IM Round Robin 'Festival Saha Bijeljina 2026' (7/9, 2628 performance). This marked his third GM norm, following his first at the Medjunarodni velemajstorski turnir in Bijeljina in 2022 (7/9, 2603 performance) and second at the Zupanja Celebrates Chess - 70 Years of Pride and Tradition in Croatia in 2025 (7/9, 2615 performance).
Dengla learned chess from his mother at age five and competed in his first multi-day tournaments at six. "I started learning chess when I was five. I played my first few-day tournaments when I was six. Since then, I have always been in love with the game. Initially, it started as a hobby," he told Chess.com in 2022. A student at Dhirubhai Ambani International School, he took a gap year from Philips Academy in the US during 2025-26 to focus on chess, training under coaches Vishnu Prasanna and Zaven Andriasian.
His earlier triumphs include a perfect 7/7 at the 2024 Grand Paris Masters Championship among 250 players and gold at the FIDE World Schools Rapid and Blitz Championship that year (7.5/9). Dengla joins Mumbai GMs Praveen Thipsay and Aditya Mittal. India, whose first GM was Viswanathan Anand in 1988, now has four female GMs: Koneru Humpy, Harika Dronavalli, R. Vaishali, and Divya Deshmukh. Dengla's achievement underscores India's rising chess dominance.
