Divya Deshmukh (born 9 December 2005) is an Indian chess grandmaster. In July 2025, at the age of nineteen, she won the FIDE Women’s World Cup in Batumi, Georgia, becoming the first Indian woman to do so. The victory made her a grandmaster, the fourth Indian woman to hold the title, and qualified her for the Women’s Candidates Tournament. She was also a member of the Indian team that won gold at the 2024 Chess Olympiad.
Quick Facts
| Full name | Divya Deshmukh |
| Born | 9 December 2005, Nagpur, Maharashtra, India |
| Age | 20 |
| Sport | Chess |
| Title | Grandmaster (2025) |
| Major titles | FIDE Women’s World Cup (2025); World Junior Girls Championship (2024); Asian Women’s Championship (2023) |
| Olympiad | Team gold and individual gold (2024) |
| Parents | Dr Jitendra Deshmukh and Dr Namrata Deshmukh |
Early Life
Deshmukh was born in Nagpur to two doctors, Jitendra and Namrata Deshmukh. She began to play chess at five, when her parents enrolled her at a local academy, and went to Bhavan’s Bhagwandas Purohit Vidya Mandir. She won the national under-7 title in 2012. Her mother gave up her medical practice to travel with her to tournaments.
Career
She won the world under-10 girls’ championship in Durban in 2014 and the under-12 title in Brazil in 2017, and collected the Woman FIDE Master, Woman International Master and Woman Grandmaster titles along the way, the last in 2021. She became the national women’s champion in 2022 and an International Master in 2023.
At the Chess Olympiad in Chennai in 2022 she won an individual bronze medal playing for India’s second team. In 2023 she won the Asian Women’s Championship in Almaty and then, as the lowest-rated player in the field, the women’s rapid event at the Tata Steel tournament in Kolkata, ahead of the reigning world champion Ju Wenjun. After a tournament in the Netherlands in early 2024 she wrote publicly about spectators who commented on her appearance rather than her games, starting a discussion about how women players are treated.
In June 2024 she won the World Junior Girls Championship at Gandhinagar. At the Olympiad in Budapest that September she scored 9.5 points from 11 games on the third board, winning the individual gold medal as the Indian women’s team, with Vaishali Rameshbabu and Tania Sachdev, took the title for the first time.
She was seeded fifteenth at the Women’s World Cup in Batumi. She knocked out the second seed, Zhu Jiner of China, in the fourth round, beat her compatriot Harika Dronavalli in the quarter-finals and defeated the former world champion Tan Zhongyi in the semi-finals. The final, against Koneru Humpy, was the first between two Indians. Both classical games were drawn, and on 28 July 2025 Deshmukh won the second rapid tie-break game with the black pieces to take the title. Under the rules the winner is awarded the grandmaster title directly; she had not previously made a single grandmaster norm. She became India’s 88th grandmaster.
Playing Style
She is known as an aggressive, well-prepared player who is at her best in sharp positions and in faster time controls, and for her composure in tie-breaks.
Achievements
Frequently Asked Questions
When and where was Divya Deshmukh born?
Divya Deshmukh was born on 9 December 2005 in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India and is 20 years old.
Featured image: Divya Deshmukh at the Tata Steel Chess Tournament, Wijk aan Zee, January 2025. Photo by Frans Peeters, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
