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The word ‘spy’ in today’s context is a corrupted thing – James Bond seemingly indestructible balancing glasses of martini shaken not stirred with a killer smile. A spy is a mix of glamour, charm and death, never mind John Le Carre’s quiet men and smiley spy mastering in the background. The ones who do die onscreen go out in a blaze of girls and glory – which was why, at one point, there was an attempt to morph Noor Inayat Khan with Mata Hari, an European attempt, it may be pointed out. After all the combination of princess and spy was too heady a cocktail to resist, even though the actual person was far from being so exotically flamboyant.

In the year of the Pope’s apology to the world for the Holocaust, Noor has become India’s martyr, offered up to prove that we too were there, even though at the time we were busy trying to chase the British off our shores.

The recent Noor researches kicked off with Shauna Singh Baldwin’s The Tiger Claw, which was a fictionalized delving into Noor’s life and the tortures that she eventually suffered at the hands of her Gestapo captors. Baldwin had a logic for it too – Noor’s engagement to a Jewish pianist which gave her a personal involvement with the holocaust.

Shrabani Basu’s book is the first non-fictional account of Noor’s life and tragic death written by an Indian. As such it may be expected to have deeper insights than the books written by Jean Overton Fuller and later writers. However Overton Fuller had the advantage of being a friend of Noor’s and talking to the living breathing entity. Shrabani Basu, on the other hand has had the co-operation of Noor’s brother and access to several archives that were hitherto not made available to the public. Where the Indian influence is concerned, she is Bengali, Hindu and the London correspondent of the Ananda Bazar Patrika, worlds apart from a musical Sufi descendant of Tipu Sultan’s who had an American mother and grew up in Paris. While Basu might have a better viewpoint on the implications of Sufism and being of Indian origin during a period of history which for most Indians meant the Freedom Struggle rather than World War II, her insights into Noor’s life remain restricted and she is cautious about guesswork.

One reason for this, of course, is the fact that Noor remained obstinately secretive about her relationships later in life. Her loves seem to have begun with Dutch Sufi aristocracy, flirted for six frenzied years with the Jewish pianist Goldberg when she hovered on the brink of nervous breakdowns, moved on to another Dutch diplomat posted in Calcutta during World War II and then gone obstinately underground to defy the deepest delvings of researchers. The best most researchers, and even Jean Overton Fuller, could do was guess.

The other problem is the contradictions that abound in Noor’s character. Noor was apparently very poor spy material. Despite being apparently physically fearless and able to take falls from horseback without flinching, she was totally hysterical when subjected to a mock interrogation session in the middle of the night at Beaulieu. Headed by spymaster Buckminister, these sessions verged on unnerving reality, stopping only short of actual physical torture. Noor was in tears after the first of these sessions. She was also a little confused by the codes that they were in use at the time, especially by the one time pad which consisted of silk sheets with random letters and numbers on it. In fact, she almost never became a spy at all. It was only because Buckminister insisted that his gut told him she had qualities which went beyond the superficial that led to her being sent to France. He also felt that Spooner her supervisor "had it in for her." If Spooner really had, Noor might have still been alive.

On the face of it, she was certainly a very unlikely undercover agent, worlds apart from the every day forgettable people that made ideal spies at the time - her tawny skin made her stand out a mile despite the Creole cover story that was invented for her. This should have disqualified her immediately, unless someone was thinking along the lines of what we know today as a ‘honeytrap’. But there is no evidence of any seduction plot against the Gestapo and, in any case, a breed that disapproved of gypsies is equally likely to have turned against Noor. They were, in fact, harsher on her, we hear, ‘because of her dark skin’.

The girl is ‘clumsy’ her hand feet co-ordination is bad and yet, when she is arrested by the Germans and matching her wits against Vogt, a remarkably kind jailer, she attempts to escape out of a bathroom window and balances ‘sure-footedly’ on a gutter. The clumsy girl has suddenly transformed into a cat burglar, even though she falters when it comes to throwing herself down from the roof into the alleyway below. Is this something that an editor should have questioned, or is it a streak of Sufi mysticism coming into play?

The girl who was terrified by a test interrogation survives the jackboots and fists of the Gestapo with a superhuman heroism and has enough defiance left in her body to gasp, "liberte!’ as the final bullet is sent through her brain. Was her life a triumph of gut feel over physical evidence then? Certainly there is a great deal about Noor’s life that defies logic and scrutiny and in depth research does not seem to have allowed Shrabani Basu to get a handle on what motivated Noor to leave her family and an unnamed fiancée behind especially since ‘visitors were touched by her dedication to her family’. Obstinacy yes, the girl was obstinate and she sank her teeth into the hand of the man who first captured her like a tigress, so that he bled for quite a while.

What we do gain is the impression of a totally amateur set of people trying to spy on the Germans who were far more organized and subversive than them. Bored girls puffing on cigarettes while receiving desperate messages from operatives across the channel and so forgetting to notice whether the ‘bluff security check’ was in place or not. On one hand there were elaborate ‘toys’ like exploding pens and micro dot cameras being manufactured next to the Victoria & Albert Museum. On the other there were acts of careless gallantry that endangered more people than they helped.

Why did Noor feel that, as a descendant of Tipu Sultan, it was her duty to fight the Germans? Perhaps it had something to do with a basic battle of good against evil. Or because there was something so lacking in her personal life that she needed a crusade to compensate. She held out against the Germans for three months, despite the cards being stacked against her, a little like her favorite heroine Joan of Arc. Her story is so fascinating that all Shrabani Basu has to do is narrate it and the reader will be held spellbound.

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