Noor Inayat Khan, who was a descendent of Tipu Sultan, was honoured with the Blue Plaque, which is given to notable figures of history, in London. Noor Inayat Khan, a WWII spy and descendant of ruler Tipu Sultan, became the primary Indian origin woman to be honoured with the Blue Plaque within the UK.
Image sources England Heritage
The Blue Plaque scheme travel by a people Heritage charity honours notable people and organisations by installing an indication in an exceedingly public place to commemorate the link between the place and also the person.
Khan’s plaque has gone up at 4 Taviton Street in London’s Bloomsbury district, where she lived as a undercover agent during the war, with the inscription “Noor Inayat Khan GC 1914-1944 SOE Agent codename ‘Madeleine’ stayed here”.
Image sources England Heritage
The plaque has been awarded to her for her service within the Special Operations Executive during WWII. She was the primary female operator be sent into Nazi-occupied France and is additionally remembered as Britain’s first Muslim war heroine.
“It is fitting that Noor Inayat Khan is that the first woman of Indian-origin to be remembered with a Blue Plaque. As people walk by, Noor’s story will still inspire future generations. In today’s world, her vision of unity and freedom is more important than ever,” said Shrabani Basu, author of Spy Princess: The lifetime of Noor Inayat Khan and therefore the founder-chair of the Noor Inayat Khan Memorial Trust (NIKMT).
Tipu Sultan’s descendant
Khan was born on 1 January 1914 in Moscow to Hazrat Inayat Khan, a musician and Sufi preacher, and Ora Ray Baker, an American.
Her father Hazrat Khan was raised in Baroda but the family moved to Paris during warfare 1 so to London. She was born in Russia during her father’s extended stay within the country to perform concerts. His maternal grandfather was the noted musician Ustad Maula Bakhsh Khan whose wife, Qasim Bibi, was the granddaughter of Tipu Sultan — the 18th century ruler of the dominion of Mysore.
Noor Inayat Khan came to Britain together with her family after France fell to Third Reich in November 1940. She enlisted within the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) as Nora Inayat Khan on 19 November 1940 and, towards the top of 1941, applied for a commission in Intelligence.
Khan was “fluent in French, she knew the world, and he or she was an excellent manipulator. So she went in undercover behind enemy lines and she or he worked there for 3 months putting in crucial links and sending information back to London”.
In France, she posed as a children’s nurse and bought the pseudo name Jeanne-Marie Reinier. Within 10 days of her arrival, all country spies in Khan’s network had been arrested and she or he was asked to return, but she refused. “Her transmissions became the sole link between the agents round the Paris area and London,”
Published author & musician
Khan was a talented musician, who played the harp and therefore the piano. She also wrote short stories and poems. After school, Khan translated the Jataka Tales — fables about the previous incarnations of mystic — in English. Her book Twenty Jataka Tales was published in 1939.
In October 1943, when she was on the brink of return home, she was captured by the Gestapo, the political police of Nazi Germany, and was sent to a German prison in confinement. A year later, she was sent to the Dachau concentration camp and was executed on 13 September 1944 when she was only 30 years old.
She was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre with Gold Star in 1946, a French military award, and therefore the George Cross, the second highest award within the UK, in 1949.
Author Kishwar Desai, who bought film rights for Khan’s story 10 years ago, said that the award was very well-deserved. “These steps go towards ensuring that awareness spreads about the very fact that Britain was built by many various nationalities and other people of various religions and colour".
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