Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Satyajit Ray's The Chess Players … is the ambivalence with which Ray views the matter of politics and progress, recalling the fact that twenty years ago, in Jalsaghar, he demonstrated how an aristocratic landowner's irredeemable social negligence might yet aspire to a state of grace through his overruling delight in beauty. There, more overtly but no more inescapably than in the new film, Ray's direction recorded the death of a way of life, a suicide willingly undertaken because pure beauty cannot survive untarnished in a crassly material world….

[Ray splits his viewpoint three ways.] Two of these, represented on the one hand by the montage sequence which sketches a concise but enormously expressive account of Britain's relationship with [the Nawabsof Oudh], and on the other by the tale of the two chess players, are governed by the historical determinants of British colonial arrogance...