Noor Inayat Khan: The Secret Agent

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.