World War II spy first woman of Indian origin to get UK plaque honour

London, August 28

Britain’s World War II spy, Noor Inayat Khan, on Friday became the first Indian-origin woman to be honoured with a memorial Blue Plaque at her former family home in central London. The Blue Plaque scheme, run by the English Heritage charity, honours notable people and organisations who were connected with particular buildings.

Khan’s plaque has gone up at 4 Taviton Street in Bloomsbury, where she lived before she left for Nazi-occupied France in 1943 as an undercover radio operator for Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE).

Noor, the daughter of Indian Sufi saint Hazrat Inayat Khan and a descendant of the 18th century Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan, went on to be killed at Dachau concentration camp in 1944, having revealed nothing to her captors, not even her real name. “When Noor Inayat Khan left this house on her last mission, she would never have dreamed that one day she would become a symbol of bravery,” said Shrabani Basu, historian and author of ‘Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan’.

The SOE was an independent British Secret Service set up by Britain’s war-time PM Winston Churchill in 1940 and Noor became its first female radio operator sent into Nazi-occupied France. — PTI