Book Review The Tiger Claw Shauna Singh Baldwin

chillibreeze writer — Shriti K

The Tiger Claw by Shauna Singh Baldwin opens a primeval forest – of racism, betrayal, hypocrisy, evils of the war, sexist undergrowth, Sufi universalism, war time espionage, inner conflict, exile and above all love. All amorphous elements and, yet, a near perfect form emerges through the novel. The form is a portrait of Noor Inayat Khan-her story told against the backdrop of World War II.

As a young student at Sorbonne, Noor meets and falls in love with a Jewish pianist and composer, Armand Rivkin. Raised by a Sufi musician father and an American mother, her world views are largely secular and clash with those of her uncle Tajuddin, who becomes her guardian when her father dies. When her uncle forbids her to see Armand in the name of religion and propriety, Noor continues their relationship in secret until the war forces her to flee to England for her own safety. Parted from the love of her life, she volunteers to be trained as a radio operator by the British intelligence and is selected to be sent to France to contribute to the underground resistance movement. Her true mission is a deeply personal one - to be reunited with her love. Her talisman, an heirloom tiger’s claw encased in gold given my Dadijaan, her grandmother, becomes her symbol of hope and identity in times of utter chaos.

The story is however not linear. It works at different levels – as a quest for love, a biography of sorts, a war story, a tale of espionage, a story of the marginalization of a woman in a war created by powerful men, a story of resistance and a story of the loss of a previous order and the emergence of a new one. The main character of the story, Noor, finds herself marginalized not only because she is a woman but because she is a ‘Michelese’ or one of mixed parentage. She stems from an Indian father, that too a Muslim, and an American mother. She is seen as someone who has no roots in England or in France or even in India, making her perfect spy material. She is love with a Jew and that makes her doubly marginalized in German Occupied France. She finds herself locked in a camp at Pforzeighm where she holds her own in the face of a German Officer, Vogel, who seems extremely intrigued by her and promises to ease her torture if she calls him by his first name, Ernst.

Noor is glorified in the prison when called an ‘Indian princess’ by Vogel. It gives her a certain exotic quality that draws Vogel to her and prolongs her denouement in the camp. This striking quality rings through the novel. The color of her skin sets her apart, sometimes giving her a fascinating quality as mentioned earlier and at other times making her susceptible to suspicion. In the novel Renee betrays her as she doesn’t believe in Anne-Marie Reigner or Madeliene, the different names Noor takes as a spy agent.

Through Noor, Shauna Singh succeeds in juxtaposing the war in Europe with the struggle for independence in India. Color and race had become an important part of world politics. Jews were being held in concentration camps by Hitler while the British were holding the reigns of a country whose inhabitants were termed as ‘brown monkeys’. The novel questions such a divide.

The form of ‘The Tiger Claw’ is also worth a mention. The chapters are intermittently dressed with pages that she wrote and hid from the jailor during her course at the camp. These are addressed to her unborn child who she refers to as ‘ma petisse’: The child of Armand Rivkin who she aborts with the help of her sister Zaib. The letters are like a conversation, which reveal her inner self. They fluctuate between hope, despair, happiness and darkness, giving us insights into all the characters of the novel. In doing so she gives Noor a shape that looms larger than all others.

The book has recently been nominated for the best fiction category for The Hutch Crossword Book award and has also been a Giller Prize finalist.

It lacks the rich tapestry of Shauna Singh Baldwin’s earlier work ‘What the Body remembers’ but holds the interest and curiosity of the readers. It is a complex simplicity enmeshed in sincerity to the subject.

All in all, a good read!

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