Indian heritage WWII spy Noor Inayat Khan gets honoured with blue plaque in London

LONDON: World War II British secret agent Noor Inayat Khan has become the first woman of Indian origin to be honoured with a blue plaque in London.

Khan worked as a British spy in Nazi-occupied France before being executed in a concentration camp, having revealed nothing to the Gestapo, not even her name. She posthumously received the George Cross.

Born in Moscow to an Indian father, Sufi master Inayat Khan, a descendant of Tipu Sultan, and to white American Sufi poet who adopted the name Pirani Ameena Begum, Khan, a Muslim, lived with her family in Paris much of her life. But they decided to move to England in 1940 to join the fight against fascism.


Despite her pacifist Sufi upbringing, Khan enrolled for the Special Operations Executive, a secret service set up by Winston Churchill, and in June 1943 she was the first female radio operator to be sent into Nazi-occupied France.

The building at 4 Taviton Street, Bloomsbury where the plaque is erected, was her mother’s home where she lived from mid-1942 until she left for France.

On 14 October, she was captured by the Gestapo and later sent to Dachau concentration camp where in 1944, aged 30, she was shot dead.

The English Heritage London blue plaques scheme links significant figures of the past to the buildings in which they lived or worked.

Khan’s biographer Shrabani Basu who applied for the plaque 14 years, said: “She was an unlikely spy. As a Sufi she believed in non-violence and religious harmony. Yet when her adopted country needed her, she unhesitatingly gave her life.”

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee unveiled a blue plaque commemorating Irish educationalist Sister Nivedita in 2017. Other Indian-heritage people to have been commemorated with blue plaques include Mahatma Gandhi, Swami Vivekananda and Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel.