Mumbai: Filmmaker Ketan Mehta has said, he is in talks with Katrina Kaif to play the legendary World War II spy, Noor Inayat Khan, in his ambitious project Noor, says a media report.
Asked if Katrina is on board for the biopic, Mehta said, “It's too early to comment. I am in the initial stages of negotiation. I will make a formal announcement soon.”
Who is Noor Inayat Khan?
Noor Inayat Khan was the great-great-great granddaughter of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of Mysore who tried to stall the advance of East India Company forces at the end of the 18th century.
The daughter of a famous Sufi mystic and musician, and an Indianised American mother, she was remembered by all as a “dreamy”, sensitive child.
Yet Noor the spy became a tigress whose bravery and defiance startled – and outraged – her German jailers and torturers.
She was the first female radio operator sent into Nazi-occupied France by the Special Operations Executive (SOE).
Through the summer of 1943, the 29-year-old spy found herself virtually in charge of Resistance communications in the Paris area as the Gestapo arrested cell after cell around her.
Madeleine was Noor's Resistance codename. From her spellbound SOE trainers at Beaulieu Manor to the governor of Pforzheim jail who came almost to revere the prisoner he kept in chains, Noor left no one unmoved.
Princess Noor-un-nisa Inayat Khan, George Cross, Croix de Guerre with gold star, MBE: the British secret agent, was kicked into a “bloody mess” on the stone floors of Dachau concentration camp through the night of 13 September 1944, and then shot with the word "liberty" on her lips.
When told during his postwar interrogation about her death in Dachau, Hans Josef Kieffer – head of the Gestapo headquarters in Paris – broke down in tears. She was captured by the Germans and captivated under the 'Night and Fog' decree.
Noor grew up in the suburbs of Paris, at “Fazal Manzil”, a house in Suresnes outside which a military band still plays in her honour every July 14.
The eldest child of four, she suddenly had to take charge of the family when her father's death on a visit to India in 1927 left her mother immobilised by grief. The crisis turned Noor the dreamer into Noor the leader.
In the 1930s, Noor studied music at the Paris conservatory, and child psychology at the Sorbonne.
She also became a talented writer and broadcaster of children's stories. She wrote a book, Twenty Jataka Tales (1939). She got engaged to a pianist of Jewish origin.
After Germany invaded France in June 1940, Noor, apassionate believer in India's right to independence from colonial rule, ade the moral choice that fixed the course of her life, and death.
She and her brother Vilayet decided, in the face of Nazi aggression, that non-violence was not enough. They jointly vowed that they would work “to thwart the aggression of the tyrant”.
Surviving the chaos of the mass flight from Paris to Bordeaux, they made a dramatic seaborne escape to England.
There, Noor volunteered for the WAAF (Women's Auxiliary Air Force) and started on the long road of signals and wireless training that would lead her to recruitment as a secret agent in November 1942.
