‘Spy Princess’:
Noor Inayat Khan
By Dr Rizwana Rahim
Chicago, IL
Picture a young Indian
Muslim woman born in Moscow, brought up mostly in
France where she studied music at Paris Conservatory
and child psychology at Sorbonne, wrote children’s
books (‘Twenty Jataka Tales’ published
in 1939; still in print) and worked with Radio Paris
till Hitler invaded and occupied France.
Then, picture her escape under fire to England,
joining British Royal Air Force’s highly secret
Special Operations Executive (SOE), dropped in the
German-occupied France to secretly transmit messages
back to London, getting caught red-handed by the
Gestapo, kept in solitary confinement, taken to
Dachau concentration camp, brutally beaten, shot
and incinerated in an oven. That was on 14 September
1944, and she was Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan, a great-great-great-granddaughter
of Tipu Sultan. Her last words were ‘Liberte`’
(French for ‘liberty’).
In April, 1949, she was given Britain’s highest
civilian award for bravery (George Cross or GC;
civilian equivalent of the highest military award,
Victoria Cross); France did the same with its Croix
de Guerre (CdG). Only two or three other British
women have received similar honors, posthumously.
London Sunday Express had a big write-up on her
on 5 June, 1949. Not long after that, her friend
Jean Overton Fuller published her biography, ‘Madeleine’
(1952) -- her SOE code-name. This book was reprinted
in 1971 as “Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan, GC,
MBE, CdG” (ISBN: 0214653056).
Noor’s father, Pir Inayat Khan -- the grandson
and pupil of Moula Baksh (both of Baroda) -- was
a Sufi, mystic and musician who had traveled in
the US and Europe during 1910-1926, and developed
quite a following. While on a musical recital tour
in San Francisco, he met the 23-year-old Ora Ray
Baker (originally of Albuquerque, NM), who was a
relative of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian
Science. They were married in 1913 in Paris, after
which she took the name of Sharada Ameena Begum.
Noor was born a year later (1-2 January 1914) in
Czarist Moscow, while her parents were there at
the invitation of Gregory Rasputin, who wanted to
see the court of Nicholas II explore Sufism. Before
the Revolution, Noor and her parents went to Britain,
and from there later to settle in France. Their
house ‘Fazal Manzil’ in the Paris suburb
Suresnes, is still in the family: Noor’s younger
brother, Vilayet Inayat-Khan, lived there till his
death at 87 in June 2004. Near its gate, there is
a memorial plaque for Noor, and in front of the
house, French military still honors her memory on
July 14 every year.
Her latest biography, “Spy Princess: The life
of Noor Inayat Khan” by Shrabani Basu, a London-based
journalist, was recently published in the UK and
is to be released in the US in March 2006 (ISBN:
0750939656; Sutton Publishing, UK; 256 pages). Apart
from her own research and personal interviews with
friends and family of Noor (including with her brother
Vilayet, a year before his death) and those who
knew her in France, Germany and England (including
some SOE officers and even former Nazis), Basu got
to see quite a bit of material recently declassified
by SOE. Even though a lot is still shrouded in mystery,
what has been cobbled together in ‘Spy Princess’
adds some more details to the previously known facts.
Before this, Noor has been a subject of novels and
at least one movie, but interesting as they are,
facts need to be teased out from fiction in these
romanticized biographies: Laurent Joffrin’s
“La princesse oubliée” (2002);
Shauna Singh Baldwin’s “Tiger Claw”
(2004); and Warner Br others movie, “Charlotte
Gray” (2001), based on a composite character
(a Scottish rather than an Indian woman).
Noor’s life in France was run-of-the-mill,
she did what girls of her age normally did. Her
father died on his trip to India, when she was 13.
Her mother never recovered from the shock, so Noor
took charge of her three siblings and ran the household.
She completed her studies (music and psychology),
became a writer, worked, and fell in love with a
Jewish musician, Armand Rivkin. When Hitler invaded
France in June 1940, she and her brother Vilayet
(despite their Sufi pacifist beliefs) were determined
to fight the Nazis, but the French army collapsed
which forced her family to escape to England, never
to see Armand again.
In England, she and Vilayet “volunteered”
to join the British War effort, as Vilayet writes
in ‘Memories of My Sister’: she joined
the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and
he, the RAF to be trained as fighter pilot/bomber.
Because Noor’s fluency in French was considered
an asset, she was trained as a radio operator, prepared
to be an underground intelligence-gatherer within
occupied France. She wanted to fight for the British
Empire but was also passionate about India’s
independence.
During the night of 16 June 1943, she and two other
women were secretly dropped off in the LeMans area
of France, each complete with a new identity (Noor
was Anne-Marie Régnier, a woman caring for
her sick aunt, separate from her code-name, ‘Madeleine’).
She was there to join the physician network (‘Prosper’)
led by Francis Suttill, which she did.
Unfortunately, within weeks, the Gestapo were able
to break up ‘Prosper, and arrest a number
of agents. The Germans were hearing more about ‘Madeleine’
transmissions, but she eluded them and their direction-finding
trucks. She had a couple of close shaves, but she
talked her way out of it. Because of the growing
risk, she was ordered to return and not to transmit
anymore but she didn’t want to desert her
colleagues, continued to file reports on the run,
and stayed on, often living and operating under
the Gestapo nose. In fact, she was perhaps the only
active radio-operator when the Allied troops landed
on Normandy.
Finally, someone (probably Renee Garry, a sister
of one of her contacts) reported her to the Gestapo
for about a 1,000 Francs. Noor was promptly arrested,
red-handed, with all her secret codes, notes, contacts
(she was surprisingly lax about security). She was
not only non-cooperative as a prisoner, but also
tried, but failed, twice to escape. From Paris,
she was moved to Germany, first to Karlsruhe prison,
then to Pforzheim for solitary confinement and then
to Dachau, where one night she was “kicked
for hours into a bloody mess,” then taken
out, forced to kneel and shot to death along with
three other female SOE operators, and thrown in
a crematorium oven.
At a memorial service in Paris, General de Gaulle's
niece said this about Noor: "Nothing, neither
her nationality, nor the traditions of her family,
none of these obliged her to take her position in
the war. However, she chose it. It is our fight
that she chose, that she pursued with an admirable,
an invincible courage."
Referring to a plaque on the St. Paul’s Church
of Knightsbridge, London, that honored the war dead,
including Noor, the Newsweek’s George Will,
wrote a touching column about her, ‘The Price
of Quiet’ in August, 2001: “Noor's was
just one life sacrificed in the last century so
that we could live in this one, oblivious of such
sacrifices….The [wall plaque] records a small
portion of the pain that purchased this quiet.”
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