The Sufi Spy

It certainly helps to know Noor's life story in reading Singh's novel. Noor Inayat Khan was a great-great-great granddaughter of Tipu Sultan of Mysore. Her mother was an American while her father, Inayat Khan, was a Sufi mystic who went to Moscow to teach Sufism to the Czar's court. Noor was born in Russia in 1914, but the family left shortly afterwards for London. From there Inayat Khan again shifted his family to Paris, where he also preached Sufism's message of tolerance and love for humanity. He died when Noor was 13, and subsequently she studied modern languages, graduated from Sorbonne and began writing for various magazines. Noor also wrote children's fairy tales for radio broadcasting. When war broke out, she escaped with her family to London. Her brother joined the Royal Air Force, and Noor was recruited (as was my uncle, though for entirely different purposes) by the SOE, and subsequentlytrained as a wireless operator. Given the code-name 'Madeleine' (the title of the last children's story written by her) Noor was flown to German-occupied France in June 1943. In Paris, constantly shifting addresses, with her agent network under constant pursuit by the Gestapo, she transmitted radio messages on German troop movements, etc., till her capture in October 1943. On September 11, 1944, along with three other captured British female agents, Noor was taken from prison to the Dachau concentration camp. Next morning in the dawn darkness they were walked up a hill, told to kneel down, and shot from behind by an SS officer. According to legend, Noor died shouting 'Liberty.' She was posthumously awarded the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre for heroism.

This is the real-life framework on which the American-born Indian author, Shauna Singh Baldwin, has hung her fictional narrative. The book covers the years 1943-45 in Noor's life, with a short epilogue set in 1995. In between is interleaved, through other voices, flashbacks and letters, the story of Noor's life. The dominant themes in the book, as stated by the author in recent interviews, are an exploration of what it meant to be a 'culturally and racially hybrid woman' during wartime, as well as the inner turmoil that Noor must have felt as a Muslim Indian woman (reared, on top of everything else, in the Sufi tradition!) risking her life for a British Raj that was suppressing the freedom movement in India. The last led to difficulties for the author in finding publishers in UK and the USA, where apparently empire-bashing, even the comparatively mild one in the book, is not 'in' after 9/11. In the book, Noor falls in love with a Jewish man in Paris, and which leads to family tensions, giving the author the opportunity to demonstrate how the real world can stretch Sufi beliefs of tolerance and inclusion very thin indeed!

The author has done her homework very thoroughly. It shows especially in her mastery of European wartime detail, especially that of German-occupied France: 'A pair of cocky young men with slicked-back long hair, long coats and drainpipe trousers passed carrying a bundle: a cat wrapped in a small straitjacket. The poor animal would soon be passing for rabbit in black market bistro tureens. "Lapin roti au four…au poivre…au fenouil."' Where Singh tends to come up short is in the transitions between the characters' inner lives and their outward behaviour, which are not always seamless. The novel lurches at crucial points, as when Kabir, her bombardier brother, searching for Noor among the millions of DPs (Displaced Persons) in the immediate aftermath of the war, moves from a reflection on Churchill's 'rice denial policy' (it led to the deaths by starvation of three million Indians), to an almost surreal conversation with a black G.I. about 'coloured' soldiers in the Allied army. Characters tend to think of Quranic verses, or say In'shallah, at odd moments. The love between the Muslim Noor and Jewish Armand is rendered at times in stilted terms, which is at odds with the fluency achieved elsewhere.

But despite these drawbacks, overall, the novel is a gripping, well-paced, well-structured tale and knowing how the plot ends does not at all detract from the reading.

Yasmin Haider-Smith works for public radio in Minneapolis, USA.