Authors: Shrabani Basu
I had first heard of Noor Inayat Khan many years ago in an article about the contribution of Asians to Britain. I was immediately drawn to the subject and read Jean Overton Fuller’s
Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan
, which was fascinating.
As an Indian woman myself, Noor’s life held a natural attraction for me. How a Muslim woman from a conservative spiritual family went on to become a secret agent, working undercover in one of the most dangerous areas during the war, was something I wanted to study in detail. The fact that Jean Overton Fuller’s book had been written over fifty years ago in 1952 made me feel it was worth making another attempt. Noor was an unlikely spy. She was no Mata Hari. Instead she was dreamy, beautiful and gentle, a 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 she went on to display such courage and fortitude in the field that she was presented the highest civilian honours – the George Cross (UK) and the Croix de Guerre (France). She was one of only three women SOE agents to receive the George Cross, the others being Violette Szabo and Odette Sansom.
The opening of the personal files of SOE agents in 2003 gave me the leads I had been looking for. Though the main players in the field, Noor’s chiefs and associates at SOE – Maurice Buckmaster, Selwyn Jepson, Vera Atkins and Leo Marks – were all dead, I was confident that Noor’s own files and the files of the agents who worked with her in the field would provide fresh material. In an area like the secret service there will always be gaps which cannot be filled. Meetings are held in secret and hardly any records kept. Most of Noor’s colleagues were killed in France, murdered in various concentration camps, and few lived to tell their tale, making the job even more difficult. With the help of Noor’s family – her brothers Vilayat and Hidayat, Jean Overton Fuller’s account, SOE archives and other sources – I have tried to complete the jigsaw of Noor’s life and her final road to death.
While working on this book, I realised that Noor has been romanticised in many earlier accounts with much information about her that is pure fantasy. 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 invited by him to Russia to give spiritual advice to Tsar Nicholas II. She is said to have been born in the Kremlin. None of this is true, though much of it has been repeated in many seminal books on the SOE.
Noor was an international person: Indian, French and British at the same time. However, she is better known in France than in Britain or India. In France she is a heroine. They know her as Madeleine of the Resistance and every year a military band plays outside her childhood home on Bastille Day. A square in Suresnes has been named Cours Madeleine after her. She has inspired a best-selling novel
La Princesse Oubliée
(The Forgotten Princess) by Laurent Joffrin, which has also been translated into German. Joffrin has given her lovers she did not have and taken her through paths she did not walk; it is a work of fiction.
Sixty years after the war, Noor’s vision and courage are inspirational. I hope my book brings the story of Noor Inayat Khan to a new generation for whom the sacrifices made for freedom are already becoming a footnote in history.
Shrabani Basu
November 2005
S
ince the publication of the book in 2006, I have had an overwhelming reaction from people who have been moved by Noor’s story. The Indian government honoured Noor in September 2006 when the External Affairs minister, Pranab Mukherjee, paid an official visit to her childhood home in Suresnes and said that Noor’s story of “heroism, bravery and sacrifice would always inspire the younger generation”. It was the first formal recognition of Noor Inayat Khan by the country of her ancestors. Across the Atlantic, Noor has inspired a music CD, dance compositions and a play. An international film is on the cards.
In February this year a packet dropped through my letter box from a school in Manchester. It contained a book called
Liberté
brought out by Year Six children as part of a project. On the cover was a child’s sketch of Noor in her WAAF uniform. Inside were imaginary dialogues and letters composed by the children, including letters Noor may have written from prison. For Noor, this tribute from children would surely have been one of the most precious. To know her story lives on is truly rewarding.
London, May 2008
H
er hands and feet chained together, classified as a ‘very dangerous prisoner’, Noor Inayat Khan stared defiantly at her German captors. Her dark eyes flashed at them as they tried to break her resistance. They had virtually starved her, keeping her on a diet of potato peel soup, struck her frail body with blows and subjected her to the dreaded Gestapo interrogation, asking her again and again for the names of her colleagues and her security checks. She had said nothing.
But at night, in the confines of her cell, she gave vent to her anger and pain. Fellow prisoners in neighbouring cells could hear her sobbing softly.
Kept in solitary confinement, unable to feed or clean herself, Noor’s mind wandered off to her childhood days. The dark German cell seemed a world away from her childhood home in France where her father sang his Sufi songs in the evening and Noor played with her younger brothers and sister. Little ‘Babuli’, as her father used to call her, had come a long way.
She was now Nora Baker, a British spy, being tortured and interrogated in a German cell. Ten months had gone by since she had been captured in France. She had a chain binding her hands together and another binding her feet. There was a third chain that linked her hands to her feet so she could not stand straight.
Her father’s words kept coming back to her, his gentle Sufi philosophy, but also his reminder to her that she was an Indian princess with the blood of Tipu Sultan in her veins. She called out silently to Abba to give her strength. And the great-great-great-granddaughter of Tipu Sultan, the Tiger of Mysore, held on, though she knew the end was near.
At 6.15 that evening the men from the Gestapo entered her cell again. Noor was told it was time to go. ‘I am leaving,’ she scrawled in a shaky hand on her food bowl and smuggled it out to some fellow French women prisoners. It was her last note. Still chained, Noor was led out of her cell and taken to the office.
At the prison office, Noor was met by three officials of the Karlsruhe Gestapo. She was driven in handcuffs to Karlsruhe prison, 20 miles away.
Early in the morning, around 2 a.m., Noor met three of her fellow spies, Eliane Plewman, Madeleine Damerment and Yolande Beekman, at the Commandant’s office. Noor had trained with Yolande in England. Josef Gmeiner, head of the Karlsruhe Gestapo, told them they were being moved. Still in handcuffs, the four young women were driven in Gmeiner’s car to Bruchsal Junction to catch the express train to Dachau, 200 miles away. Their escorting officers, Max Wassmer and Christian Ott, gave them some bread and sausages for the journey.
After the confines of the prison, it felt good to be outdoors. There was a brief halt at Stuttgart where they boarded another train for Munich. The young women were given window seats in the same carriage and allowed to talk to one another. Naturally, they chatted animatedly. It was a pleasure for them to meet colleagues and speak English again. One of the women had some English cigarettes on her which she passed around. When they were finished, the German officer offered them some German cigarettes which they also smoked. It almost felt like a picnic.
On the way there was an air raid. The train pulled up at Geisslingen and waited for 2 hours. The women stayed calm as Allied aircraft flew overhead, even though they could hear the sound of the bombs. It had been three months since the Allies had landed in Normandy. The girls exchanged what information they had about the invasion.
At Munich they changed trains again. Their escorting officers made them board a local train for Dachau. It was midnight when the train finally reached the siding there. Still in handcuffs, the prisoners were ordered to walk the 2 kilometres to Dachau concentration camp.
The air was cold as the young women prisoners struggled towards the camp with their bags. The first chilling sight was of the camp’s searchlights, visible from afar. As the beams swept the area, the new arrivals could see the high walls of the camp, and the barbed wire. Built in 1933, it was the first concentration camp to be constructed by Hitler, close to his base in Munich, where thousands of Jews, gypsies and prisoners of war were to meet their deaths. Other camps, including Auschwitz, were built later with Dachau as the model.
Noor and her colleagues were taken through the main gate of the camp inscribed with the words
Arbeit Macht Frei
(Work Will Make You Free). The words were ironic because few walked free from Dachau. Over 30,000 people were exterminated here between 1933 and 1945.
As they entered the camp, they could see the line of barracks on their left. Inside, in rows of dirty bunk beds, lay the inmates, crammed like cattle, half starved and thinly clad, inhabiting a world somewhere between the living and the dead. Along the side of the barracks ran the electric fences covered with barbed wire and the deep trench which prisoners were warned not to cross. Further down was the crematorium. Outside it stood a single post with an iron hook. Here the Gestapo hanged their prisoners, often stringing them up from meat hooks with piano wire and leaving them to die slowly.
The four young women were taken to the main registration office and then led to their cells where they were locked up separately. In the early hours of the morning, the SS guards dragged Madeleine Damerment, Eliane Plewman and Yolande Beekman from their cells, marched them past the barracks to the crematorium and shot them through the back of their necks.
For Noor, it was to be a long night. As the prisoner who had been labelled ‘highly dangerous’, she was singled out for further torture. The Germans entered her cell, slapped her brutally and called her names. Then they stripped her. Once again she bore it silently. All through the night they kicked her with their thick leather boots, savaging her frail body. As dawn broke over the death camp, Noor lay on the floor battered and bleeding but still defiant. An SS soldier ordered her to kneel and pushed his pistol against her head.
‘
Liberté!
’ shouted Noor, as he shot her at point blank range. Her weak and fragile body crumpled on the floor. She was only thirty.
Almost immediately, Noor’s body was dragged to the crematorium and thrown into the oven. Minutes later eyewitnesses saw smoke billowing out of the crematorium chimneys. Back in England that night, her mother and brother both had the same dream. Noor appeared to them in uniform, her happy face surrounded by blue light. She told them she was free.
T
he story of Noor Inayat Khan began on New Year’s Day in Moscow in 1914. As the frozen Moskva river gleamed in the reflected light of the green and purple domes of the Kremlin, a baby girl was born in the Vusoko Petrovsky monastery, a short distance from the Kremlin. The proud father was the Indian Sufi preacher Hazrat Inayat Khan, and the mother a petite American woman with flowing golden hair, Ora Ray Baker. They named their little girl Noor-un-nisa, meaning ‘light of womanhood’. She was given the title of Pirzadi (daughter of the Pir). At home their precious little bundle was simply called Babuli.
Inayat Khan and Ora Ray Baker had arrived in the city of Moscow in 1913. For Inayat it had been a long journey from his home town in sunny Baroda in western India to the snowy splendour of the Russian capital. He had left India on the instructions of his teacher Syed Abu Hashem Madani to take Sufism to the west. Inayat was the grandson of Maula Baksh, the founder of the Faculty of Music at the University of Baroda, and Casimebi, the granddaughter of Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-century ruler of Mysore. The family enjoyed a proud heritage as descendants of the Tiger of Mysore, as Tipu Sultan was known, who had fought bravely against the British.
Yet the family did not publicise this royal heritage, for political reasons. After Tipu Sultan had been killed fighting the British on the battlefield of Seringapatam in 1799, his family was forcibly removed from Mysore to prevent further rebellion in that area. The son of Tipu Sultan was also subsequently defeated and killed in Delhi fighting the British during the uprising in Vellore in 1806. According to family legend his daughter, the 14-year-old princess Casimebi, was taken to safety by two faithful servants – Sultan Khan Sharif and Pir Khan Sharif. They were the sons of an officer who had served under Tipu Sultan. The princess was taken secretly to Mysore and her true identity concealed. Because she was of royal descent, Casimebi could marry only a person of noble standing, who carried royal honours and titles.
1
As luck would have it, Inayat Khan’s grandfather, Maula Baksh, went to Mysore in 1860 and sang at a competition before the Maharaja that lasted for eleven days. A skilled singer in both the North Indian classical style and the South Indian Carnatic classical style, Maula Baksh won the competition. The delighted Maharaja of Mysore presented him with a
kallagi
(turban ornament),
sarpesh
(turban),
chatra
(large umbrella),
chamar
(fly whisk) and the right to have a servant walk in front to announce him. When Maula Baksh received these emblems of royalty, the two retainers secretly arranged his marriage to Princess Casimebi.
Maula Baksh was now told of the secret of the princess’s ancestry. Casimebi’s heritage was talked about only in whispers (lest the British discover that the retainers had hidden one of Tipu’s descendants). Maula Baksh and Casimebi then moved to Baroda (also known as Vadodara) in Gujarat at the invitation of the city’s ruler. Here Maula Baksh started the Gyanshala or Music Academy, overlooking the lake, where it still stands.