The Tiger Claw

"Nora Baker is known in British history as the first ever woman to have been awarded the George Cross, but very few people know that she was a young Muslim woman, allegedly killed by the Nazis on the allegation of being a successful British spy. Noor Inayat Khan was the daughter of an Indian Muslim Sufi mentor, a classicist and non-conformist of genteel traditions. Noor was born to her American mother in Moscow where Khan had been holding concerts of Indian classical music besides imparting Sufi training to his acolytes. Noor has attracted very few serious historical works and not enough is known about the circumstances leading to her tragic death at a time when the war was itself coming to a close. Shauna Baldwin’s The Tiger Claw is certainly a dextrously organised story of Noor and her work in Paris with the French Resistance as well as her own life as a Sufi Muslim who sought employment with the British intelligence due to various mundane reasons. Benefiting from extensive research in Britain, India, France and Germany, Baldwin was able to interview several knowledgeable people along with the immediate members of the Khan family in their native Baroda. In the novel Madeleine, whose brother Kabir Khan has been an RAF pilot and after the war is seeking the whereabouts of his adventurous sister, personifies Noor. Madeleine is shown to have been in love with Armand, a French Jew, who himself is incarcerated by the Nazis, and part of her mission is to reconnect with him. The novel is a story of Madeleine’s heroics and near-death encounters in Paris where the Gestapo runs a very successful network of spies and agents to track down the Resistance and its Allied supporters. On the other hand, the British have their own contacts to facilitate landing and housing of several of their agents, though some of these facilitators might be operating as double agents. Madeleine is both an asset and a dilemma for her British superiors since she is a native woman from colonies but with a unique and cosmopolitan pedigree, while for the French she is almost local though a bit exotic. For Germans, such as her inquisitor Ernst Vogel, she is a mischlinge (mixed breed) but still in the league of fabulous Indian princesses. Her arrest and then torture until the execution – not necessarily by her tormentors – are tragic and the novelist is at her best in conveying the sense of pathos as well as resistance exhibited by a petite woman of resolute fortitude. She is known as a writer of children’s stories and leaves her narrative surreptitiously in her dark cell. Kabir and the readers are informed, to their consternation, that Madeleine had been executed though the novelist herself is sceptical about the nationality of her executors. Many years after the war, Kabir is ensconced in his ancestral house in Paris as the spiritual successor to his father and it is here that he sees Armand, who has survived the war and the Holocaust, yet, in his own quiet and serene way, carries the memories of his slain lover."