Profile in courage

Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan
By Shrabani Basu, Roli, Rs 395

There has been a resurgence of interest in the role of women in World War II. One area where women did contribute in significant numbers was in the Special Operations Executive, formed, in the words of Churchill, “to set Europe ablaze”: in other words, to operate in collaboration with native resistance movements in Nazi-occupied Europe, particularly France, to sabotage and disrupt the forces of law and order. Those who fell into enemy hand met a terrible end. Many cracked under the pressure.

One of the unlikeliest secret agents in the struggle against Nazism was Noor Inayat Khan. Her story has all the ingredients of a romantic myth, and has provided the material for two novels, most recently, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s Tiger’s Claw. Shrabani Basu, in this latest biography of Noor Khan, tries hard to disentangle fact from fantasy. She finds it difficult to break the saintly halo — Noor seemed to have charmed everyone she met with her singular sweetness of character — but she does raise some questions about her suitability for clandestine missions in Occupied France.

Working with the SOE demanded great strength of character and presence of mind. Noor would eventually display both these qualities in abundance. The gentle writer of children’s stories — including a version of the Jataka Tales — endured solitary confinement, brutal interrogation and torture, with defiance and courage. Her end was horrific: chained in solitary confinement, she was finally kicked “into a bloody mess” with a bullet in her head on the floor of her cell in Dachau. She revealed nothing to her captors, not even her real name.

Nothing in her upbringing and circumstances could have prepared Noor Inayat Khan for the ordeals that awaited her at the hands of the Gestapo. She was the eldest daughter of an Indian musician and Sufi teacher from Baroda, a descendent of Tipu Sultan. Hazrat Inayat Khan, her father, was a gentle and charismatic man, who after leading a group of Indian musicians in Europe and America, gave himself wholly to the Sufi movement. It was during his visit to the United States that he met and married a young American woman whom he named Amina Sharada Begum.

This was the pacifist and cultured environment in which Noor and her three siblings grew up. Hazrat Inayat Khan led a peripatetic existence, whether in Imperial Russia (where Noor was born in 1914), London and finally Paris, where the family settled into a large house, Fazal Manzil, courtesy the charity of a rich devotee. Shrabani Basu builds up a picture of a vague and dreamy child, playing fantasy games and writing poetry.

One could wish however, that Basu was a little more critical of the role of Inayat Khan — he seems to have had an irresponsible, even impractical streak, content to live off charity, and then suddenly taking a decision to leave his family and go back to India, where he died very suddenly. The shock left her mother prostrate with grief and unable to support her children: Noor had to take charge. The crisis brought out unexpected reserves of strength in the gentle girl as she took charge of the family, finding solace in her writing and music.

Despite living in Europe, Noor was a passionate believer in Indian independence. Yet, like many Indians who served in the British forces, “she had no doubts about supporting the Allied war effort against Germany”. Possibly the invasion of France, her adopted country, could have had something to do with it. In the face of Nazi aggression, Noor and her brother, Vilayat, took a decision, in his words, “to thwart the aggression of the tyrant” and to jettison their creed of non-violence.

After a dramatic flight to England in a small boat, Noor joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, where she trained in wireless and signals, and from all accounts became adept, though she never mastered the physical aspects of the training. Despite her forthright views about Indian independence to her interview board, she eventually received a commission. But Noor was not fated to continue as a lowly radio operator. Her French upbringing, fluent French and wireless skills brought her to the notice of Military Intelligence, and recruitment into the SOE.

Through the story of Noor, Basu raises some pertinent points about the effectiveness of the SOE. The “Baker Street Irregulars” as its operatives were known (a reference to Sherlock Holmes’s rag-tag urchins), seem to have brought to their task a blend of naïve idealism and schoolboy derring-do. Basu’s account of code poems given to agents, and the blunders that sent most of Noor’s French network to their deaths makes one wonder if it achieved anything at all against the brute might and machinations of the Nazi war machine.

Basu has had access to recently declassified files into this shadowy war. Here the comments of Noor’s SOE trainers reveal their reservations about her suitability for secret missions: despite her excellent radio skills, she was absent-minded and performed miserably during a mock interrogation. According to a colleague, Yvonne Cormeau, a successful agent herself, Noor was “a splendid vague dreamy creature, far too conspicuous — ‘twice seen, never forgotten’ — who had ‘no sense of security’ and should never have been sent to France.”

But Colonel Buckmaster, her boss in SOE, and the cryptographer, Leo Marks, were so taken by her “fine spirit” that they insisted that she be sent as a secret agent. Within days of her arrival, her Prosper network collapsed. In danger of her life, the vague dreamy creature with the code-name Madeleine, now began a desperate game of outwitting the Gestapo, making flawless radio transmissions, and constantly changing her lodgings. For three months, she was on the run, until betrayed by one of her contacts.

Forced by the Gestapo to continue transmitting to Britain, she sent an alert, which the SOE ignored — the organization took nearly five months to realize that Noor had been captured, by which time, there was little that could be done. In captivity, Noor now showed real aggressive defiance. She made two unsuccessful attempts to escape, and was sent to Pforzheim Prison in Germany. After months of beatings and abuse, she was deported to Dachau, where with three other women agents, she met her end in September, 1944. She was just thirty years old. No one who came in contact with her during this time — from fellow prisoners to her German captors — was unaffected by her quiet fortitude.

While Noor’s wartime work was rewarded with the award of the George Cross (Britain’s highest civilian award for gallantry) and the Croix de Guerre, she was soon forgotten in Britain. In France, she is still remembered as a heroine. Basu brings out the many paradoxes in Noor’s life: the child of mixed ancestry, the Sufi pacifist who chose to fight, the dreamer who tried to outwit evil, the nationalist who fought on the British side, yet was more at home in France.

Perhaps the best tribute to Noor came from the niece of President de Gaulle, at her memorial service in Paris: “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, invincible courage ...For all of us, for the children of this country, what a marvelous example.” Basu should be commended for her patient attempt to piece together Noor’s story; shorn of all the myths and romantic fictions, it is still the record of a remarkable life.