MAEV KENNEDY
In the winter of 1942 only the striking beauty of the young Indian woman reading a book on a London park bench in her lunch hour would have seemed exceptional.
A statue has now been unveiled by Princess Anne near the bench in Gordon Square, commissioned by a small group determined that the extraordinary story of Noor Inayat Khan, a gentle artistic intellectual who became a secret agent in occupied France and died aged 30 in Dachau concentration camp, should not be forgotten.
“The family is pleased - of course - honoured and touched,” said Noor’s cousin Mahmood Khan van Goens Youskine, who came from his home in the Netherlands for the ceremony along with family, friends, supporters and veterans from Germany, France, Russia and the United States. “This is a beautiful place to remember her story.” He was a boy of 12 when he last saw his cousin, but he remembers her vividly. “She made a tremendous impression on everyone who met her. She was such an intelligent, charming, dainty girl,” he said,” and so beautiful. She was her father’s eldest child, and so much was expected of her.” Khan was a musician and writer, daughter of an American mother and a renowned Indian Sufi philosopher father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, descended from the 18th-century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan.
She was born in Moscow, lived as a child in London and France, and by 1942 was living again in Taviton Street, just off Gordon Square, and in training as a secret agent known as Nora Baker. In 1943 she was sent by the Special Operations Executive into Nazi-occupied France as a radio operator. Her biographer Shrabani Basu recalled at the ceremony that the last time she left the house in Taviton Street, she was unable to tell her mother and sister that she would probably never see them again.
In France she was betrayed, imprisoned, repeatedly interrogated, and finally shot in September 1944 with three other female agents at Dachau, where their ashes are lost among those of more than 30,000 others who died there. She was posthumously awarded the George Cross, but the campaign for a permanent memorial, believed to be the first of an Asian woman in Britain, was launched by Basu.
The £60,000 cost of the sculpture by Karen Newman was raised by a small group with the backing of the prime minister and MPs including Valerie Vaz and Glenda Jackson. University College London, which owns the square, and the local authority, Camden council, gave permission for the memorial to be sited where she spent some rare happy hours of leisure.
Music composed by Khan as a teenager and by her brother Hidayat Inayat-Khan was performed at the unveiling ceremony, and a message from him was read by his grandson Omar.
It said: “Her family hopes her story will now be better known, but they have never forgotten her. “It was an absolute question of conscience and conviction for her. She could not do otherwise with such a shadow hanging over Europe,” her cousin said. “Even when she knew she had been betrayed she refused to leave France until they could get another wireless operator in. When she attempted to escape from prison, she was asked to give her word that she would not try again, but she would not and so she was held in chains. “Her brother came through the war, and has lived to be a very old man, into his 90s. And every day of his life the thought of his sister and her fate has come into his mind.”            –Guardian