Noor Inayat Khan - Early Years

Early Years

Noor-un-Nisa Inayat Khan was the eldest of four children. Her siblings included Vilayat (born 1916), Hidayat (born 1917), and Khair-un-Nisa (born 1919). She was of royal Indian descent through her father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, who was born to nobility and came from a princely Indian Muslim family. (He was a great-grandson of Tipu Sultan, the 18th century ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore.) He lived in Europe as a musician and a teacher of Sufism. Her mother, Ora Meena Ray Baker (Ameena Begum), was an American from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who met Inayat Khan during his travels in the United States. Ora Baker was the half-sister of American yogi and scholar Pierre Bernard, her guardian at the time she met Hazrat Inayat Khan. Noor's brother, Vilayat Inayat Khan, later became head of the Sufi Order International.

In 1914, shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, the family left Russia for London and lived in Bloomsbury. Noor attended nursery at Notting Hill. In 1920, they moved to France, settling in Suresnes, near Paris, in a house that was a gift from a benefactor of the Sufi movement. After the death of her father in 1927, Noor took on the responsibility for her grief-stricken mother and her younger siblings. The young girl, described as quiet, shy, sensitive, and dreamy, studied child psychology at the Sorbonne and music at the Paris Conservatory under Nadia Boulanger, composing for harp and piano. She began a career writing poetry and children's stories and became a regular contributor to children's magazines and French radio. In 1939 her book, Twenty Jataka Tales (ISBN 978-0892813230), inspired by the Jātaka tales of Buddhist tradition, was published in London.

After the outbreak of the Second World War, when France was overrun by German troops, the family fled from Paris to Bordeaux and from there by sea to England, landing in Falmouth, Cornwall on 22 June 1940.