Noor Inayat Khan
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The authors of this article are
i) Indian warrior princess Noor Inayat Khan becomes a sensation in Britain
Kounteya Sinha,TNN | Apr 4, 2014, The Times of India
ii) Noor Inayat Khan
Divya Talwar, BBC Asian Network, Jan 01 2011 BBC Asian Network iii) Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan
By Shrabani Basu
Sutton Publishing. Available with Liberty Books, Park Towers, Clifton, Karachi
Tel: 021-5832525 (Ext: 111) Website: www.libertybooks.com
234pp. Rs1,500
iv) Noor Inayat Khan
June 11, 2006
REVIEWS: The monkeys have crossed the bridge
Reviewed by Asif Farrukhi
1
Britain's Asian spy Noor Inayat Khan was shot by the Nazis in 1944 after being betrayed
"Liberte!" - That was the last word spoken bythe heroine of Churchill's elite spy network before being executed by her Nazicaptors. On 13 September 1944, the glamorous British agent, code named "Madeline," was shot dead at Dachau concentration camp. Despite being tortured by the Gestapo during 10 months of imprisonment, shehad revealed nothing of use to her interrogators. Noor Inayat Khan, died aged just 30, but her story has gone down in history.
She was an incredibly brave woman and I think it isimportant that her bravery is permanently recognised in this country” End Quote Shrabani Basu Noor Inayat Khan Memorial Trust
She joined Winston Churchill's sabotage force, the Special OperationsExecutive (SOE), and became the first female radio operator sent into France in1943, with the famous instruction to "set Europe ablaze".
The role was so dangerous that she arrived in Paris with a life expectancyof just six weeks.
Gestapo arrests
Noor became the last essential link with London after mass arrests by the Gestapo had destroyed the SOE's spy network in Paris. As her spy circuit collapsed, her commanders urged her to return, but she refused to abandon what had become the principal and most dangerous post in France because she did not want to leave her French comrades without communications.
For three months, she single-handedly ran a cell of spies across Paris,frequently changing her appearance and alias until she was eventually captured.
Despite having a full description of her and deploying considerable forcesin their effort to break the last remaining link with London, it was only her betrayal by a French woman that led to Noor's capture by the Gestapo.
Noor's decision to stay in Paris to fight Nazism was a decision that cost her her life.
Despite carrying a passport of an imperial subject she had no innate loyalty to Britain.
Winston Churchill sent SOE agents to Francein 1943 with the instruction to "set Europe ablaze"
Born in Moscow to an Indian father and an American mother, she was a directdescendant of Tipu Sultan, the renowned Tiger of Mysore, who refused to submitto British rule and was killed in battle in 1799.
Her father was a Sufi Muslim who moved his family first to London and thento Paris, where Noor was educated. But when war broke out in 1939, Noor and one of her brothers, Vilayat,decided they had to travel to London, dedicating themselves against what theysaw as the evil of Nazi Germany.
Her fluent French, quiet dedication and training in radio transmitting werequickly spotted by SOE officers. Highest sacrifice
Noor's bravery has long been recognised in France, where there are twomemorials and a ceremony held each year to mark her death. However, in Britain, although Noor was posthumously awarded the George Crossin 1949, her courage has since been allowed to fade in history.
That is about to change with the launch of a campaign to raise £100,000 toinstall a bronze bust of her in London, close to her former home.
It would be the first memorial in Britain to either a Muslim or an Asianwoman.
Shrabani Basu, who spent eight years researching Noor's history in officialarchives and family records, said: "I feel it is very important that whatshe did should not be allowed to fade from memory.
Noor died for this country. She made the highest sacrifice. She didn'tneed to do it. She felt it was a crime to stand back.
She was an incredibly brave woman and I think it is important that herbravery is permanently recognised in this country.
The project, which has the backing of 34 MPs and prominent British Asians,including human rights campaigner Shami Chakrabarti and film director GurinderChadha, is being led by Noor's biographer, Shrabani Basu who wrote The SpyPrincess in 2006. Around £25,000 of the cost of the bust has been raised and permissiongranted to install the sculpture on land owned by the University of London inGordon Square, close to the Bloomsbury house where Noor lived as a child in1914, and where she returned while training for the SOE during World War II.
The memorial is scheduled to be completed and installed by early 2012. Noor Inayat Khan's story will be featured on Asian Network Reports onTuesday 11 January at 1230 and 1800 GMT and afterwards on BBCiPlayer
HERS was no obscure life but there is something about the very name of Noor Inayat Khan and the little-known circumstances which invite curiosity. An independent young woman from the lineage of Tipu Sultan, the daughter of a Sufi practitioner and master born in Moscow and living in Paris of indeterminate Indian-British-French origin and citizenship, the author of books for children, radio operator-cum-British secret agent in the dangerous war against the Gestapo, a prisoner of the Nazis and finally yet another nameless victim of the crematorium at the notorious Dachau, a war heroine whose brave, adventurous life and gruesome death needs to be pieced together — is somebody making up all this?
Too incredulous to be fiction, this is the real life story of Noor Inayat Khan, a remarkable blend of diverse influences and sources, who managed to fill her brief life with courage. For this reason, her biography at places seems to turn into an old English spy novel but not once does it cease to amaze nor does the reader feel disinterested.
Not even half as well-known as she deserves to be, this amazing woman remains an enigma, even when you have closed the last pages of her well-documented new biography. Was she for real? Who was she anyway? What inspired and motivated her to lead such an extraordinary life? Her handling of pain and conflict, imprisonment and torture and then the inevitable finality of her young death make it apparent that hers was no ordinary spirit.
Reading this biography, it feels like one is going around in circles without really being able to know what she was actually like. Still, whatever little we are able to put together from the pages of the book is fascinating enough.
It was many years ago in a small bookstore in Sri Lanka, the kind which caters to the idle and mildly bored tourists on the beach front that I picked up a small volume of Jataka Tales which promised to be an easy read and an introduction to this snake-swallowing-its-own-tail kind of stories full of wisdom. The author’s name was spelled out as Noor Inayat Khan but almost no details were offered. Making a mental note of the name, whatever little I was able to gather from different places seemed to be made up of stuff that other books are made of. So the real tale was her life. The real value of Shrabani Basu’s recent biographical study is that it summarises, in a readable manner, all that is known about this enigmatic personality and creates awareness about the gaps which are still open to conjecture.
The very substance of her life makes it open for wild speculation. There is a list of what she was not and yet made out to be just that, as Basu points out in the introduction: “She has been said to have been recruited while on a tiger hunt in India. Her father, an Indian Sufi mystic, is said to have been close to Rasputin and was invited by him to Russia to give spiritual advice to Tsar Nicholas II. She is said to have been born in Kremlin. None of this is true, though much of it has been repeated in many seminal books on the Special Operations Executives (SOE).”
Yet, any of this could have happened or almost did, because such was Noor’s enigma. Basu is on firmer ground in explaining what Noor was not: “Noor was an unlikely spy. She was no Mata Hari. Instead she was a dreamy, beautiful and gentle, writer of children’s stories. She was not a crack shot, not endowed with great physical skills and a far cry from any spy novel prototype.” Yet it was for her courage and fortitude that she won top civilian honours from France and Britain, including the George Cross.
In spite of all the de-mythologising, Basu also makes it apparent that she herself was fascinated by this mysterious woman, calling her “a natural attraction”, in spite of being the subject of many questions: “How did a Muslim woman from a conservative spiritual family go on to become a secret agent, working undercover in one of the most dangerous areas during the war?”
Noor was the eldest daughter of an American mother who converted to Islam and married Inayat Khan, a Sufi who also played musical instruments at various places in Europe. The parents and the children, Noor’s siblings, appear to be a close-knit family and even during imprisonment at the hands of the Nazis, we learn of her sadness at not being able to send the usual birthday poems to her loved ones. Did the strength she displays during her final days, derive from her father’s Sufi background? This is another conjecture. We do not know much of her interest and possible initiation into these matters. Basu does not throw much light on her father who remains shrouded in mystery.
Her book on the Jataka tales is also evidence of unusual interest as this is not something in which somebody with her background is likely to indulge in. The Jataka tales are not everybody’s cup of tea and she is probably the first Indian Muslim who was interested in retelling these tales, a precursor of Intizar Hussain, the arch-fabulist of modern Urdu literature.
The writing of this book calls for a bare mention in Basu’s work and we learn of it when British spy trainers get to read a copy while initiating Noor into the spy code. One of them even thinks that these tales will make her an invaluable coder. “The monkeys have crossed the bridge,” she is told, referring to one of the most beautiful tales in the book. The phrase implies a supreme sacrifice on the part of one of the monkeys who made himself a part of the bridge so that the others could cross over. Although her life was no Jataka tale, this is ultimately what Noor did with her life.
The end came too soon, and too painfully. Her brother is quoted as thinking that had she lived, she would have joined India’s freedom struggle. She left behind her marvellous legacy and many unfulfilled possibilities. Basu’s book is a tribute to the brave spirit and is a delightful read.
