Princess. Musician. Writer. Spy.
The short description of all of Noor Inayat Khan’s identities during her brief lifetime reads like the title of a John le Carré novel. Yet despite the fact that her work as an undercover radio operator and liaison between the French resistance and British intelligence during World War II was an important part of the planning for the D-Day invasion, Khan’s story remained on the sidelines of history for decades.
That’s been changing in recent years. In 2018, the New York Times honored her with an obit in their “Overlooked No More” series. In 2021, production on a television miniseries about Khan, Spy Princess (starring Freida Pinto of Slumdog Millionaire in the title role) was announced.
Khan was captured by the Gestapo in Paris in October 1943. Despite months of torture and interrogation, she never gave up any information about what the Allies knew. She was executed at Dachau at age 30 on September 13, 1944.
Noor Inayat Khan: The Forgotten Spy
Mon 12/11 7 PM, Edge Theater, 5451 N. Broadway, sarahsiddonssociety.org, $18 Sarah Siddons Society members, $25 nonmembers. There will be a talkback with Narula after the performance.
Almanya Narula has been fascinated by Khan’s story since she was ten and found a brief footnote about the spy in a book while living in Thailand with her mother. That fascination has turned into Narula’s acclaimed solo show, Noor Inayat Khan: The Forgotten Spy, which comes to Chicago for one performance on December 11, courtesy of the Sarah Siddons Society, at the Edge Theater. Winner of multiple awards in the 2022 Hollywood Fringe Festival, Narula’s show also appeared earlier this month at the United Solo festival in New York City.
Narula is a onetime Chicago actor, fight choreographer, and journalist, now living in LA. (A former contributor to the Reader, Narula started her own publication, Chicago Theatre Now, in 2018, developed during her time in the arts journalism graduate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.) She still comes back to town for theater work; most recently she served as fight choreographer for Steppenwolf’s POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive.
Narula, who is Indian and Thai, and whose career began in Bollywood productions as a child, remembers that fateful encounter with the footnote on Khan.
“I grew up in Thailand and my mom was operating as a single mom. She worked multiple jobs for us to survive. She was a teacher, and she’d work after school and tutor. She didn’t want me to stay home alone, so she’d tell me, ‘Go to the mall. Go to the bookstore,’ or whatever. I would go to this bookstore and most of the time I would just read comics and things like that. For some reason, that day I was compelled to open up a World War II history book.” She found a footnote that mostly just said, as Narula recalls, “‘Indian princess, World War II British spy.’ I didn’t read much more than that because my mom came and I had to put the book away, but it just stuck in my head for years.”
The fact that Khan was Indian was the biggest thing that stuck with Narula. “At the time, there still wasn’t a ton of representation for Indian people in media,” she notes. “Even though I was born in Thailand, I was raised for the first part of my life in India, so when I came back, I wasn’t operating like a Thai Indian. I was operating like an Indian Indian. I still had the accent and things like that. There was a lot of prejudice toward Indian people in Thailand at that time. I just felt really isolated. Nothing in Hollywood made me seem cool. We had Harold and Kumar and Apu and The Big Bang Theory kind of thing. I was just very disheartened. So anytime I found an Indian person in history, or anywhere, I’d be like, ‘Oh my god,’ and it would stay in my head.”
On the surface, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of parallels between Khan’s life and Narula’s, aside from their shared Indian heritage. Khan was indeed a princess through her father, a musician and philosopher named Inayat Khan who was a devotee of the mystical practice of Sufism. (Her mother was American.) Khan was born in Moscow and grew up living between Paris and London. Her father died when she was 13, leaving her to help raise her younger siblings. Somehow she found time to write short stories, play music (harp and piano), and study child psychology at the Sorbonne.
Yet despite her accomplishments (including her skills as a radio operator, acquired during a stint with the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force in Great Britain in 1940), Khan was not considered a great prospect by the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the undercover intelligence mission she joined as the first woman radio operator. A superior officer, Colonel Frank Spooner, wrote in her personnel file, “Not overburdened with brains but has worked hard and shown keenness, apart from some dislike of the security side of the course. She has an unstable and temperamental personality and it is very doubtful whether she is really suited to work in the field.”
Khan ended up outlasting every other radio operator in the field. Within ten days of her arrival in Paris, SOE asked her to return; all the other agents in her network had been arrested. She stayed and did the work of six under the code name “Madeline.” The average lifespan in the job was six weeks; Khan survived four months before being captured.
In Narula’s 40-minute show, framed as an interrogation between Khan and an unseen Gestapo agent, we see how Khan managed to outwit the Nazis for several months. At one point, she recounts how a Nazi officer even helped her string her radio wire outside when she told him she was trying to listen to some jazz. The stories of her time as a spy are interspersed with one of Khan’s own children’s stories about a brave monkey king who saves the lives of others by turning himself into a bridge.
The dissonance between Khan’s personality and her résumé became a big part of what attracted Narula to her story.
“Because I also come from a [stage] combat background, my initial thought was, ‘Ooh she’s a spy. I’ll find some cool James Bond stuff.’ But when I started reading her story, I realized, ‘Ah, she’s this super effeminate woman.ʼ” Narula adds, “She hated firearms. She was a pacifist. She was all like, ‘I can’t lie.ʼ”
For Narula, one key realization was that she had known someone like Khan all her life: her mom.
“I grew up in a tumultuous home and I witnessed a lot of things my mom had to face in terms of abuse. She was also the eldest daughter, so she was bred to be the second mom. Nobody literally forced her into it, but it could be argued that she had that responsibility.”
For Narula, Khan’s spying isn’t motivated solely by conscience. It was a chance to prove herself. “‘I’m going to go on this cool adventure.’ And she lands in France and everybody else gets sabotaged and she survives and she continues to survive, so I think she’s just sort of getting this kick, like, ‘Oh my god, I’m amazing for the first time in my life.’ I saw that happen with my mom, too. Finally when she had a job and because she was sort of so good at what she did, she started getting more jobs and got so hyperfocused on not just being a woman and womanly duties—she put her whole soul into it.”
She adds, “I think it’s interesting that [Khan] had this no-lying code, but when push came to shove, she lied. She had this no-fighting code, but when push came to shove, she fought. Not hand-to-hand combat, but when they eventually closed in on her, she wrestled this guy and bit his hand and he had to leave the room because he was terrified she would rip his face off.”
Khan’s story, Narula believes, resonates even more as a beacon of hope and inspiration in these dark days.
“One of the times I performed was the afternoon that Roe v. Wade was overturned. I was like, ‘Oh my god, I’m about to do this show. What the hell?’ Then I realized Noor was someone who till the end kept fighting. Someone who was seen as the wrong person for the job—who was seen as ditzy and clumsy—till the end did not give up.”
