What India has to do with Indian openings?

You're probably confusing it with Burmese Chess (Myanmar Sit Tu Yin), which I learned out of a book in the 1970s. The way I learned it, each players "left-hand" pawns (White: a- to d-file, Black, h- to e-file) begin on the third rank, the "right-hand" pawns (all the others) on the fourth. The pieces are placed on the board one at a time behind the pawns and nothing already on the board may be moved until all the pieces are on. Even when all the pieces have been placed, players can freely move pieces anywhere in friendly territory until either a capture is made or a pawn is moved.

The pieces are different as follows:

- The "Queen" moves like a fers - one square diagonally

- The Bishop is replaced by an "Elephant" which moves one square diagonally or one square straight forward (like Shogi's "silver")

- Pawns promote on the long diagonals, only to Queen, and only if there is no Queen of the same colour on the board. (A pawn already on the long diagonal can be promoted in place of making a move.)

I played Burmese chess a number of times at school; it's an amusing variant if you're used to FIDE chess, but I doubt we were playing it very well.

No, they'd be Indian-Americans. Just about everyone who uses the term "American Indians" understands it to apply to Native Americans, First Nations, red varmints, take your pick. Also I understand that certain American Aboriginals object to being called "Native Americans" since a bunch of white interlopers had no right to name a continent and its people after some European mapmaker, and if you're not referring to a specific tribe or people then you might just as well say "Indian" which at least lets them chuckle at whitey's minor geographical error.

(Similar considerations hold with Eskimos, many of whom would rather be called Eskimos than Inuit, since many of them aren't Inuit and resent the Inuit claiming to represent the whole. The Inuit, of course... well, you can probably guess.)

It was a joke. 

Oh. Perhaps you could warn us next time. You know, like wrapping fake tags around it:

[joke]A cheeseburger goes into a bar. The bartender says "Sorry, we don't serve food.[/joke]

The man behind the Indian Defences = Bonnerjee Mohishunder

Read the link below:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=85637

He played a lot of games with John Cochrane during 1850's

thats cool I was playing over his giuoco piano games the other day

as a proud warrior people you'd think they wouldn't complain as much when better warriors came along and changed things around

In Indian chess the rook is called  haathi meaning elephant.
Bishop is oont (camel)
Knight is ghoda (horse)
Queen is vazeer (minister) or rani (queen) 

It's a typo. They were invented in Indiana. Right outside of Muncie, in fact.

I'm not kidding...you can Google it. Nimzovitch spent years in the Hoosier state, honing his craft on the banks of the Wabash. 

Yes.

King's Indiana

Queen's Indiana

Nimzo-Indiana

Bogo-Hoosier

thank you

anyway those burmese guys are pretty funny 

I had a similar thought about it. My interpretation was that the three pawns looked like a tepee.

How?

Pushing one of the pawns (b2, b7, g2, g7) creates a triangle with the two other pawns beside it. Next you have the bishop go into that triangle like a person going into the tepee. It's just a matter of connecting the dots, or pawns in this case.

I believe that India was the last to go to modern chess with respect to pushing the pawn two squares on its first move.  The bishop fianchetto was a good choice back in the day when pawns could not be advanced two squares.

The player Mosihunder is responsible for introducing the fianchetto to Westerners.

He played the first Nimzo-Indian and the first King's Indian.

Biography:

"Bonnerjee Mohishunder (sometimes given as, e.g., Moheschunder Bannerjee or Mahesh Chandra Banerjee) was born around 1800 near Calcutta, India. Philip W Sergeant described him as having been as of 1848 <a Brahman in the Mofussil-up country, as we might say-who had never been beaten at chess!> Hundreds of his games survive through the writings of John Cochrane, who regularly played him between 1848 and 1860, during Cochrane's tenure at the Calcutta bar.

Mohishunder originally played traditional Indian chess, in which pawns did not have the option of moving two squares from the starting row and pawns would promote to the piece of the square reached. He probably learned Western rules after contact with Cochrane and other Europeans.

Cochrane is quoted in a letter written by a member of the Calcutta Chess Club, appearing in the Chess Player's Chronicle in 1850:

The only player here who has any chance whatever with Mr Cochrane, upon even terms, is a Brahmin of the name of Moheschunder Bonnerjee. Of this worthy, Mr Cochrane has himself remarked that he possesses as great a natural talent for chess as any player he ever met with, without one single exception.

Mohishunder favored defenses, unusual in the West, that involved fianchettoing his bishops. The Indian Defenses, such as the King's Indian and Queen's Indian, are named for Mohishunder and his countrymen. Both involve advancing pawns one square, as in Indian chess, rather than more traditional defenses like 1.e4 e5 and 1.d4 d5. Sergeant wrote in 1934 (algebraic notation substituted for Sergeant's descriptive notation),

The Indian Defences by g6 coupled with d6, or b6 coupled with e6, were largely taught to European players by the example of Mohishunder and other Indians, to whom the fianchetto developments were a natural legacy from their own game.

Among other innovations, Mohishunder played the first known Gruenfeld Defense in Cochrane vs Mohishunder, 1855, 67 years before it was "introduced" in Alekhine vs Gruenfeld, 1922."

-- http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=85637

Cochrane was not the one to introduce the fianchetto. It was Mohishunder.

The "Nimzo" in the Nimzo-Indian refers to Nimzowitsch (a pioneer in hypermodern openings).

(I think you didn't SWIDT )