Spy Princess

The Life of Noor Inayat Khan

Shrabani Basu

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780750950565
• eBook ISBN:
  9780752463681
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

'One of the most inspirational stories of World War II … Reading this book is like watching a butterfly trapped in a net.' – Daily Mail

This is the riveting story of Noor Inayat Khan, a descendant of an Indian prince, Tipu Sultan (the Tiger of Mysore), who became a British secret agent for SOE during World War II.

In this updated twentieth-anniversary edition of Spy Princess, Shrabani Basu tells the moving story of Noor's life, from her birth in Moscow – where her father was a Sufi preacher – to her capture by the Germans. Noor was one of only three women SOE agents awarded the George Cross and, under torture, revealed nothing, not even her real name.

Kept in solitary confinement, her hands and feet chained together, Noor was starved and beaten, but the Germans could not break her spirit. Ten months after she was captured, she was taken to Dachau concentration camp and, on 13 September 1944, she was shot. Her last word was ' Liberté'.

Notes

1: Babuli

1 Elisabeth Keesing, Hazrat Inayat Khan: A Biography, p. 5; Musharraf Moulamia Khan, Pages in the Life of a Sufi, p. 22; and family sources.

2 Keesing, Hazrat Inayat Khan, p. 59.

3 Begum Inayat Khan, ‘Woman’s Seclusion in the East’, The Sufi, September 1915.

4 Keesing, Hazrat InayatKhan, p. 86.

5 Will Van Beek, Hazrat Inayat Khan: Master of Life, Modern Sufi Mystic, 1983.

6 Ibid.

7 Spasskaya Ye Yu, Memoirs of Spasskaya – chapter on ‘Hindus of Moscow’ (unpublished manuscript).

8 Sergey Moskalev, of the Emperor Society of Adherents of Natural Science, Anthropology and Ethnography, Moscow University, to author, May 2004.

9 Keesing, Hazrat Inayat Khan, p. 93.

10 Moulamia Khan, Pages in the Life, p. 123.

11 Vilayat to author, Suresnes, June 2003

12 13 April 1919, when Gen. Dyer ordered his soldiers to open fire on a group of peaceful demonstrators in an enclosed area in Amritsar in Punjab, killing nearly 2,000 people including women and children. Many jumped into the well in the enclosed compound in complete panic. The troops did not stop till the last bullet had been fired.

13 Keesing, Hazrat Inayat Khan, p. 112.

2: Fazal Manzil

1 Jean Overton Fuller, Noorun-nisa Inayat Khan, p. 38.

2 Elisabeth Keesing, Hazrat Inayat Khan: A Biography, p. 157.

3 Vilayat to author, Suresnes, June 2003.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Noor’s letter to a friend from Switzerland, quoted in Overton Fuller, Noor-unnisa Inayat Khan, p. 67.

8 Hidayat to author, letter, June 2004.

9 Vilayat to author, Suresnes, June 2003. 264 Spy Princess

10 David Harper (Claire’s son) to author, letter, November 2003.

11 Mahmood Khan, Noor’s cousin, to author, telephone conversation from Suresnes, June 2004.

12 Maula Baksh’s sons-in-law lived with him after their marriages, which made the family very large. This is why Inayat Khan’s father stayed in the family house in Baroda after marrying Maula Baksh’s daughter. The sole male heir of Maula Baksh was Ali Khan and it was to his son, Alladutt Khan, that Inayat wanted to marry Noor.

13 Vilayat to author, Suresnes, June 2003.

14 Ibid.

15 Keesing, Hazrat Inayat Khan, p. 176.

16 Vilayat to author, June 2003.

17 Mahmood to author, June 2004.

18 Ibid.

19 Noor’s Personal File, HS9/836/5, National Archives, Kew. Handwritten notes by Noor about her background.

20 Mahmood to author, June 2004.

21 Noor herself would be referred to as a ‘modern Joan of Arc who had refused ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preserving a Legacy
• Introduction
• Prologue
• One: Babuli
• Two: Fazal Manzil
• Three: Flight and Fight
• Four: Setting Europe Ablaze
• Five: Codes and Cover Stories
• Six: Leaving England
• Seven: Joining the Circuit
• Eight: The Fall of Prosper
• Nine: Poste Madeleine
• Ten: Prisoner of the Gestapo
• Aftermath
• Appendices
• II Agents and Resistance members who worked with Noor and the Prosper Circuit
• III Chronology
• IV Indians awarded the Victoria Cross and the George Cross 1939–1945
• Notes
• Bibliography