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A Muslim woman of Indian descent who spied for Britain during World War II will be honored on Friday with a plaque marking her former London home, more than 75 years after she was executed in Germany.
Noor Inayat Khan is the first woman of Indian origin to receive a blue plaque under the 150-year scheme to commemorate notable figures from Britain’s past.
A plaque marking the family home in central London that he left at 29 to become the first undercover radio operator sent to Nazi-occupied France will be unveiled by his biographer Shrabani Basu in a virtual ceremony on Friday.
“When Noor Inayat Khan left this house on his last mission, he would never have dreamed that one day she would become a symbol of bravery. She was an unlikely spy,” Basu said in a statement before the ceremony.
“As a Sufi, he believed in non-violence and religious harmony. However, when his adopted country needed it, he without hesitation gave his life in the fight against fascism.”
Khan was captured and finally executed in the Dachau concentration camp in 1944, and was posthumously awarded the George Cross, one of Britain’s highest honors, for “acts of the greatest heroism.”
In 2012, after a long campaign by Basu to keep his memory alive, a statue of Khan was placed in London.
Khan was born in Russia to an American mother and an Indian father of royal descent, and was educated in Paris, fleeing France for London at the beginning of World War II.
After returning to France as an undercover agent in 1943, the German Gestapo made mass arrests of the resistance groups she was working with, putting her in danger of exposing her, and she was offered the opportunity to return to Britain.
But she refused to leave her post and when she was captured, she did not reveal anything to her interrogators, she did not even reveal her real name. It was said that her last word before being executed was “Liberte” or “Freedom”.
Khan’s plaque is the first to be unveiled since the scheme was halted during the coronavirus pandemic, and it comes at a time of intense debate over statues and other forms of commemoration after the Black Lives Matter movement.
Anna Eavis, curatorial director of English Heritage, who runs the show, said she was particularly pleased to restart it with a tribute to Khan.
“It is important to reflect the ethnic diversity of London and of course it is also important because it represents the changing role of women in the 20th century in particular,” Eavis told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“That kind of role would have been unthinkable 100 years earlier. So I think the blue plate scheme is a very important way to bring visibility to those changes for women.”
Only 14% of the more than 950 blue plates in London celebrate women and in 2016 English Heritage launched a campaign of “plates for women”, with the aim of restoring the balance.
Later this year he will reveal plaques to artist Barbara Hepworth and Christine Granville, who also served as a secret agent in World War II. – Thomson Reuters Foundation
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