Noor Inayat Khan: The Secret Agent
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Noor-un-nisa was a woman of Indian origin with an exotic background. She was born in Moscow to an Indian father and an American mother, raised in Paris, educated at the Sorbonne, and featured on French radio. Why, she was even royalty, a direct descendant of India’s great Tipu Sultan.
So why was this artistic young lady, described as a ‘quiet’, ‘shy’ and ‘sensitive dreamer’, executed in a Nazi concentration camp? The answer has everything to do with her transformation from ‘Noor-un-nisa’, a pacifist with Gandhian principles, to ‘Nora’, a secret agent and Britain’s first British-Asian war heroine.
But who was she, really?
Noor-un-nisa was the daughter of Inayat Khan, a leading Sufi preacher and classical musician from Baroda. She was of royal descent as her father’s maternal grandmother was the granddaughter of Tipu Sultan, the 18th-century king of Mysore.
As a musician, Inayat Khan sang in the royal courts of Baroda and Hyderabad but left India in 1910, to spread Sufi teachings in Europe and the US. It was at a Ramakrishna Mutt in San Francisco that he met Ora Ray Baker, an American, whom he married.
Shortly thereafter, the couple left for Moscow, where Noor was born on 1st January 1914, while her parents were guests of the Tsar. These were turbulent times filled with economic and political upheaval, and the events that followed deeply impacted Noor’s life.
A few months after she was born, World War I broke out and her family moved to London, and then to Paris. She spent her formative years in Paris, where she studied ...
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