Noor Inayat Khan: Life of a Spy Princess

By Sarah Jobling

Indian musician and renowned 'Sufi' Inayat Khan, travelled to the United States to give a concert for the distinguished family of Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Christian Science movement. In the audience was Mary’s niece, Ora Ray Baker, a young, blonde girl with blue eyes.

Ora Ray instantly fell in love with Inayat. At the time it was socially unacceptable for an Indian man to marry an American girl, so Inayat left America and went to Europe. But Ora Ray was not to be deterred. She reputedly bought a ticket and boarded a ship to England, where she tracked him down and knocked on his door with the words: 'Here I am!'

There was no going back for the young Ora Ray. Her wealthy family reacted with disgust, disinheriting her. Undeterred, she and Inayat married in London on 20 March 1913 and Ora Ray became known as 'The Begum' Inayat Khan.

When Inayat passed away in India in 1927, his widow never recovered from her grief. She became a virtual recluse, locking herself away in her room. From this point on, at the age of just 13, Noor was forced to take on the role of substitute mother to her three siblings.

Noor and her mother had an exceptionally close bond and when Noor left for France in 1943, she worried less about her own safety than about her mother's peace of mind. 'The Begum' Inayat Khan passed away just days after the official citation for her daughter’s posthumous George Cross was published.

Noor Inayat Khan: Life of a Spy Princess

Noor’s father, Inayat Khan, was born in 1882 and was the overriding influence in Noor's life. A ‘Sufi’ mystic, he was descended from Tipu Sultan - the legendary 'Tiger of Mysore' - a man responsible for fighting the British presence in India.

A devout Muslim, Inayat was sent to Europe to bring Sufism to the West. Noor's nephew, David Harper, described his grandfather's form of Sufism as 'a philosophy of the heart' rather than a religion itself, as it embraced many other religions. Inayat travels took him to the United States, where among others he became friendly with Henry Ford who gave him a car.

It was while he was in America that he met Noor's mother, Ora Ray Baker, and together they had four children, two of whom are still alive. Inayat was also a musician and at the time of Noor’s birth was teaching music at the Imperial Court in pre-revolutionary Russia. He supposedly knew Rasputin, but there is no evidence to the much repeated story that Noor was born in the Kremlin.

At the outbreak of World War One, Noor's father took the family to Britain. Then in the early 1920s, Inayat moved his family to Suresnes, a suburb to the west of Paris where they lived in a house given to him by a Sufi benefactor. He called the villa ‘Fazal Manzil’ which means 'house of blessings'. Noor's father died in February 1927, aged 44, while on a trip to India.

Noor Inayat Khan: Life of a Spy Princess

Oxford-educated Vilayat joined the Royal Air Force initially (which prompted Noor to join the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force) but because of poor eyesight he transferred to the Royal Navy, working on minesweepers and helping to clear the beaches in Normandy before D-Day.

Following Noor's disappearance in France, Vilayat searched tirelessly for his sister and it was partly through his dogged determination to find the truth that the real facts emerged.

After the war, Vilayat returned to the family house in Suresnes, near Paris, where he continued his father’s teachings in the mystical tradition of the East, eventually becoming head of the Sufi Order International.

Throughout his life he was haunted by the memory of what had happened to his sister after she had been betrayed and captured by the Germans. In June 1996, for his eightieth birthday, Vilayat chose Dachau Concentration Camp to conduct a massed choir in memory of Noor, who had died there over 50 years earlier.

Vilayat Inayat Khan died on 17 June 2004.

Noor Inayat Khan: Life of a Spy Princess

Despite Noor’s cosmopolitan background - her father was Indian, her mother American and she lived in France - she had a British passport. Her siblings were all born in Britain, but Noor was born in 1914 in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Family archives show that Noor attended kindergarten at Notting Hill in west London when the family moved to England shortly after her birth. It seems likely that her Indian father - India at the time being part of the British Empire - that entitled Noor to her passport.

Issued by the British Consulate in Lyon in 1932, the passport shows Noor aged 18. At the time she was studying music and living in the family home to the west of Paris. The pages within her passport are filled with stamps from border crossings, evidence of a woman who travelled extensively throughout Europe in the late 1930s.

But clearly at the bottom right of one of the pages is the all-important purple stamp bearing the date 22 June 1940 – the day that Noor, her mother, sister Claire and brother Vilayat arrived in Falmouth. Just days earlier they had fled their home in Paris as the invading German army advanced across Europe.

It would be almost three years to the day when Noor returned to France, but this time she would be working for the Special Operations Executive.

Noor Inayat Khan: Life of a Spy Princess

Noor was awarded the George Cross – Britain’s highest award given for acts of conspicuous gallantry not in the face of the enemy (under fire) - in April 1949. She is one of only three women awarded the honour in wartime. The other two recipients were fellow SOE Agents Violette Szabo and Odette Hallowes.

Noor had initially been recommended for the lesser honour of an MBE, but the Special Operations Executive later nominated her for a higher award. Ironically it was the deposition from Hans Kieffer, the head of the Gestapo in Paris, which finally swayed the British authorities to award Noor the George Cross.

At the end of the war Kieffer was tracked down by Vera Atkins, from SOE's French Section. He testified that unlike other captured SOE agents, Noor had revealed nothing at her interrogation in Paris. He maintained that she had consistently lied to her interrogators and that they could not trust anything she said.

Engraved on the back of her George Cross are the words ‘Asst. Sect. Officer, WAAF, Nora Inayat-Khan’. ‘Assistant Section Officer’ was the honorary rank she was given before she flew to France in June 1943. ‘WAAF’ stood for Women's Auxiliary Air Force. Her name, incorrectly shown as ‘Nora Inayat-Khan’, was probably as a result of Noor’s decision to take the Anglicised name ‘Nora Baker’ when she joined the WAAF in 1940. Since the end of World War Two only one other George Cross has been awarded to a woman.

Sufi Movement and Pir-o-Murshid of its Inner School.

Life and Family

Hidayat Inayat-Khan, son of the Indian mystic and musician Hazrat Inayat Khan and Pirani Ameena Begum Ora Ray Baker Inayat-Khan of Albuquerque, New Mexico, was born into a family of most remarkable personalities. Hidayat’s great-great grandfather was Tipu Sultan, the "Tiger of Mysore", last Supreme Potentate of All India, whose palace on the fortified island of Sering Pathan was guarded by living tigers. The great Sultan’s principle, in resisting the English conquerors to the death, was, "Better to live one day as a tiger than one year as a sheep". The Sultan’s citadel was destroyed in a historic battle, and one of his sons was killed in the mutiny of 1857, leaving a daughter, the Princess of Mysore, who was miraculously saved and raised in secret within the precincts of what used to be the citadel. Later she became the bride of India’s most famous singer and musician, Mula Bux, who was universally known as "The Morning Star of the East" and was raised to the rank of princehood by the ruling Raja.

Mula Bux founded the first Academy of Music in India, and also invented the music notation system bearing his name. He restored the fundamentals of Indian classical traditions in all fields of music, and in so doing received rewards and recognition from monarchs all over India. The first royal child to be born from his union with the Princess of Mysore was a daughter called Khatidja, who later became the mother of Inayat Khan.

Professor Inayat Khan was also the greatest singer, vina player and composer in his time, and was crowned as "Tansen" at the courts of the Nizam of Hyderabad, Mir Maheboob Ali Khan, known as the "Saintly King". It was this great Nizam who granted Hidayat’s father all the necessary help in breathing new life into India’s most sacred music and propagating it across India. Professor Inayat Khan was also the author of several books on Indian music, in particular Minca-I-Musicar, in which several songs of the author’s own composition are published in the Mula Bux notation. Another ancestor of Hidayat’s was Saint Jumma Shah from Punjab, whose holy tomb near Lahore is still visited by numerous pilgrims in homage and gratitude for the inspiration which radiates from his shrine. It is from this sacred spot that Hazrat Inayat Khan started out in 1901 on his musical travels, in the course of which he was royally welcomed by Maharajas and Nawabs all over India.

Hidayat’s father was also the first Indian musician to introduce Indian classical music to the Western world. He landed in America in 1910, after which he gave concerts of Indian music all over the world. His music was deeply appreciated by the Tsar of Russia, in whose palace he met Count Tolstoy and the famous Russian composer Scriabin. Later concerts were organised in Paris by Lucien Guitry, father of Sacha Guitry, and it was also in Paris that he became acquainted with Claude Debusy, to whom many of his own melodies were given, some of which were used in his scores. Hazrat Inayat Khan settled in London during the First World War, and it was here, in 1917 that Hidayat was born, the third of, ultimately, four children. In 1919, Hazrat Inayat Khan moved with his family to the continent, eventually settling in the Parisian suburb of Suresnes, in a large house which he named Fazal Manzil, "blessed home". In his early years, Hidayat’s life had an extraordinary, almost fairy-tale quality, for he was surrounded by the atmosphere of his remarkable father and most loving mother, and there was a constant stream of visitors coming to their home, drawn by the twin magnets of music and the Sufi Message. Sadly, those magical days ended abruptly when Hazrat Inayat Khan passed away during a visit to India, in 1927, at the age of 45. Hidayat was 10 years old.

Because of his family, Hidayat was cradled in the atmosphere of Eastern music. However, his musical schooling in the West helped orient him toward the symphonic form. His Western musical education started at L’Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris, in the violin class of Mr Sinsheimer and the composition courses of Nadia Boulanger, as well as training in orchestra conducting given by the great Diran Alexanian. He later joined the string quartet courses given by the world-famous Lener Quartet, which was followed by instruction in orchestra conducting under Toon Verheij in Holland.

During his early years, Hidayat was a professor in the Music School of Dieulefit, Drome, France, and later conducted an orchestra in Haarlem, Holland. Hidayat has written numerous compositions, among them La Monotonia Op. 13 for strings - Ghandi Symphony Op. 25 - Zikar Symphony with organ Op. 26 - Message Symphony with organ Op. 30 - Virginia Symphonic Poem Op. 44 - Concerto for strings Op 38 - Quartet for Strings Op. 45 - and a number of choral pieces including Chanson Exotique , Awake for Morning, and a collection of Sufi hymns. He is a founding member of the European Composers’ Union, and his music has frequently been broadcast internationally, as well as being released commercially by Panta Rhei of Holland.

In 1988, Hidayat Inayat-Khan assumed the role of Representative-General of the International Sufi Movement and Pir-o-Murshid of its Inner School. He divides his time between Holland and the family home in Suresnes, but travels extensively, giving classes and lectures on Sufism.