Title: The Tiger Claw
Author: Shauna Singh Baldwin
Publisher: Penguin Books, 2005
570 pages
ISBN: 0-14-303289-5

If you speak of tolerance while planting a hedge between yourself and your neighbor, as my uncle Tajuddin did, as many in France did, your hedge will one day be replaced by a fence, then a low wall, then a high wall and finally fortifications. (The Tiger Claw, 121)

The horrible attacks of September 11, 2001, gave rise to Islamophobia, unleashing a wave of distrust, disgust, and fear of "others" in the Western world. In 1944, on the same date, a 30-year-old Muslim woman was being prepared for execution by the Gestapo in Dachau, Germany, because her radio transmissions from inside Occupied Europe had provided vital information that aided the Allied Forces in their successful Normandy landings.

What motivated Noor Inayat Khan, an Indian Muslim woman with a love for music, to spy for the British when her own family and people were fighting for freedom against the same colonial power in India? Shauna Singh Baldwin asks and answers this question and much more in her passionate, provocative, and brilliant novel, The Tiger Claw.

The Tiger Claw is a fictionalized account based on the true and extraordinary life of Noor Inayat Khan, the only person to receive the highest civilian honors of both Britain and France — the George Cross and the Croix de Guerre — for the exemplary services she rendered the Allied Forces during the Second World War. From colonial India to Vichy, France; from Moscow, Russia to Boston, USA, the author painstakingly follows Noor's footsteps, telling a story of compassion, love, intrigue, and suspense.

The title, The Tiger Claw, is an allusion to the family heirloom as well as to Tipu Sultan, also known as the "Tiger of Mysore."

Noor Inayat Khan was the great-great granddaughter of the legendary Tipu Sultan, who died fighting to stop the British occupation of South India. Noor's father was the renowned Sufi mystic, musician, and philosopher Hazrat Inayat Khan. Her mother was Aura Baker (a.k.a. Rukshena Begum), an American from Boston, Massachusetts. The love-marriage caused a stir, and Hazrat Inayat Khan took his wife to pre-revolutionary Russia, where the Imperial Court accepted them as members.

Noor was born at the Kremlin on January 1, 1914. Inayat Khan and his family subsequently moved to England and then to France just before the outbreak of the First World War. Noor was the eldest of three children. When her father died on a visit to New Delhi, it fell upon the 13-year-old Noor to take care of her siblings and her grieving and bedridden mother.

Noor studied music for six years and could play the veena (a stringed instrument). She could also compose music for the harp and piano. Later, she graduated from Sorbonne with a degree in child psychology. She studied several modern languages.

Noor began her career as a freelance writer and contributed articles to several magazines and newspapers. She authored Jakarta Tales: Retold, a book of children's fairytales published in 1939 in the UK. Noor was also a radio journalist, and her stories were broadcast by RadioDiffusion Française. With the help of a French publisher, she had started to bring out a children's newspaper called Bel Age in Paris, when the Second World War broke out. Both the radio program and the newspaper benefited from Noor's musical and literary talents, which had been encouraged by her father from her early years.

Initially, Noor trained to be a nurse with the Red Cross in Paris. However, when the Germans invaded France, her family caught the last boat to Britain, abandoning their home in France. Noor's fairytales continued to be broadcast on radio, this time on BBC's Children Hour. During an interview, she told the British Intelligence Officers that she thought they were wrong to colonize the Indian subcontinent and that Gandhi was right in resisting them.

A real-life spy with the code name "Madeleine," Noor was also the first woman wireless radio operator to be parachuted into hostile territory by the Special Operations Executive (SOE) of Britain. Having been trained in nursing, she went undercover for over a year as a French nurse in Vichy France, secretly transmitting information back to London under the very nose of the Gestapo. Her looks and fluency in French and English helped Noor to pass off as a European.

However, with her black hair and eyes, she was under the constant risk of being mistaken for a Jew by the Germans or for an informer by Europeans, a danger she braved. Even while other agents were captured, Noor refused the offer to return to Britain, risking her personal safety for a cause she believed in — the freedom of all people from oppression — and recognizing how important her lone transmissions were for the Allied cause.

Noor also hoped to evade the Gestapo in order to find her lover Armand Rivkin, a Russian–French Jew, in one of the numerous concentration camps of Europe. The book has readers on tenterhooks to discover whether she could trust the people she worked with or be betrayed, and whether or not she and Armand would live to love.

Noor scoffs at Hitler's Germany celebrating Christmas — the birth of a Jewish child — while simultaneously killing millions of Jews without a second thought. She wonders about the world and her identity in it, as French, American, Indian, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, and British identities each partly claim her but never accept her completely.

The book also compels the reader to wonder about the other Noors of the world — an Iraqi mother searching for her son, an American daughter searching for her father, an Afghan woman searching for her lover, etc. The primary strength of this book is that it is very hard to separate fact from fiction, and impossible to remain unmoved and unawed.

Shauna Singh Baldwin is an Indo-Canadian author who lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. This book is a Hiller Prize finalist. United Nations Under Secretary General Shashi Tharoor hailed the book as "a deeply felt, richly evocative novel." With this book, Baldwin has proved that she is a major voice to contend with in the literary world.

She is also an award-winning writer and author of several books including What the Body Remembers. The author is brutally honest through her characters and spares no one as she compels us to think about the world we live in, or the parts of our past which we choose to ignore as unimportant by blindly accepting the womanless history of the world written by men.

Considering the present muddled global scenario, The Tiger Claw delivers a startling dose of realism to all of us. Irrespective of who the colonizer or the occupied may be, the book forces us to ask if any occupation can be benign. Noor's fearlessness in the face of death causes us to confront our own fears, since all must die at an appointed hour. Baldwin's work poses questions regarding identity and freedom through a character who is at constant risk of discovery and danger due to her multifaceted identity and her secret profession. To which identity does Noor belong, and what is the price of her freedom and happiness?

The Tiger Claw takes us on a meditative experience and allows us to explore our own lives and our world through the lives and the world of its characters. It makes us wonder if the times in which Noor lived are any different from our own. The book works on several levels depending on what the reader wants it to be — a love story, a spy thriller, a personal journey of a woman finding herself, a book that traces the roots of conflicts, just a fabulous read, or all of the above.

The style of narration is moving and ardent. Through Noor's life, we are made to ponder and question our own actions and beliefs without ever feeling the writing is preachy or sentimental. Most of the time, we feel it is Noor talking to us. I found the following lines especially relevant today:

And so, my first night back in Paris, I swore to Allah: I resist all tyranny. Know this little one, when your spirit returns from hiding in Al-ghayab, the great beyond: Say no to all oppression, whether it rise from those you love or from an enemy, for the shame and self-hatred your mother carries for not resisting when I was younger are worse by far. (109)

Thus, Baldwin forces us to challenge our perspectives of moral high ground and blissful ignorance, for eventually we are all responsible for the atrocities committed in our name by our elected and non-elected representatives. Before judging others, the author suggests we judge ourselves first, and hopes our love and compassion will triumph over our fear and reactive instinct to survive.

If you are looking for a friend to turn to every time fear and insecurity about yourself and the world creep up, this is the book to have at your bedside.