First published in article form in India Abroad, April 2005. Reproduced here with permission of Shauna Singh Baldwin

Lindsay Pereira interviews Shauna Singh Baldwin

Shauna Singh Baldwin's second novel, The Tiger Claw (Knopf, Fall 2004) is inspired by the life of Noor Inayat Khan (code name "Madeleine"), who worked as a British spy in France after the Nazi invasion

Apart from Noor-Un-Nisa Inayat Khan, there were three other SOE agents assassinated. What drew you to her alone, apart from the fact that you have also been exposed to similar `cultural shifts'?
Several books have been written about other SOE agents. Noor's story has been told by writers who have exoticized, eroticized, blamed and glorified her. What attracted me to Noor was her hybridity, and that like me, she was a second-generation diasporic Indian with strong emotional ties to India, though her actual time in India was really very short.

Your first novel featured two strong female characters and documented changes wrought on women by culture. English Lessons and Other Stories also dramatised the lives of Indian women. The Tiger Claw shares these preoccupations, to a certain extent. Is this a theme - the effect of culture on female protagonists -- that motivates you more than others?
If I started out saying to myself, "now you're going to write a story about the effect of culture on female protagonists" I think I'd have writer's block in a minute. But if I hear a little voice in my head and I ask it, "who are you?" and "why are you upset?" "what is your story?" and "please speak a little louder" and then go off and research and come back and ask it some more questions, I end up with a short story, maybe even a novel.

The world has changed dramatically after September 11. What role, according to you, does an author have to play in these divisive times? Do you see yourself playing that role?
I don't believe "the world changed dramatically on 9/11" for writers. That crime, committed by mostly Saudi men, gave an excuse to those who wished to seize the opportunity to redefine the very basis of morality. Gave an excuse to those who wish to dismantle international law, set aside the law of the land, law that ratified the Geneva and Red Cross Conventions. Gave Bush II an excuse to invade two countries for their oil, label minorities and immigrants "terrorists" and "sleeper spies," lock them up or deport them.

Bush and his neocons had planned their policies long before 9/11/01. The only issue was how to sell their program to the American people. The result of 9/11 has been that a majority of the American public has endorsed that the President has locked up foreigners for three years at Guantanamo Bay and even debated the meaning of "torture." Citing 9/11, Bush II has been allowed to enact the repressive "Patriot" Act, while shouting slogans about "Freedom." The crime of 9/11/01 just made it easier to frighten many Americans and legislators into non-critical hyper-nationalism and acquiescence.

Fiction writers continue to play the role we have always played -- we tell the lies that tell the truth. I find it's the paradox of my life as a writer that if I yearn for tolerance, I have to write about the effects of intolerance. To demand justice, I find I must explore injustice. And if I yearn for the return of liberal secular individualism I have to engage with and examine Fascism, Fundamentalism and other forms of group-think. That was true before 9/11/01 and remains true today.

You have mentioned in previous interviews that publishers in the US and UK won't touch the novel. Does this have something to do with a deep-seated fear of the outsider?
It is true that US and UK rights have not yet been sold for The Tiger Claw. I'm hopeful that will change when the political climate changes. Perhaps The Tiger Claw has the same problem as its protagonist and its writer -- no single country can fully claim it. Perhaps it's a new genre: global lit. I'm so proud that my Canadian, Indian and Dutch publishers see the global dimensions of the story, and its relevance.

The Tiger Claw is obviously not just a simple love story. Is it meant to be a critique of imperial powers in any way? Can one read it in that manner?
Sure - read it as a great adventure story, or as a comparison of colonialisms. Read it as a demonstration of Noor's progress along the Sufi path searching for her beloved, as the tale of a woman trying to resist every effort to define and classify her, or as the tale of how a woman can do a great job and end up saving France from Fascism while being a believing Muslim wearing a headscarf -- oh yes, in France. Read it as a story of how an ordinary radio operator -- only a cut above a typist -- became crucial to the successful invasion of Europe to save the continent from the Thousand-Year-Riech. Read it as a tale of love and betrayal, an allegory for our times, or a tale that says we must love so deeply and fiercely that love will outlive our bodies. Read it in many ways.

You are co-author of A Foreign Visitor's Survival Guide to America. Could you tell us a little about that?
A Foreign Visitor's Survival Guide to America was written in 1992 -- pre-Internet. You can read it as straightforward practical advice on how to prepare for your journey, rent an apartment, set up your new kitchen, find a job.. or you can read it as a book that turns the anthropological gaze back on the USA, a country considered the norm in the world, to show that the USA is really the aberration. It reverses who is the looker and who is the lookee.

Looking at a couple of earlier reviews, I noted one that said the book was "stalled with history lessons", and wondered who thought "in such lengthy, metaphorical terms". This is obviously a stylistic issue, but do you consciously concentrate more on the message than the medium? Do comments like these bother you at all?
You can't meet everyone's expections, and the comments you quote say more about the reviewer and their reading preferences than about my writing. I tell the story the way I feel it wants/needs to be told. So far I've been blessed that my stories have reached so many readers and made their own impression; they stand alone without my having to defend or explain them.

A reviewer has suggested The Tiger Claw be made into a film, with Aishwarya Rai or Jennifer Lopez in the lead role. How would you react to that possibility?
I can't picture either one as Noor, but great actresses can play any role!

Jean Overton Fuller's book talks about how Inayat Khan loved the Jataka Tales, especially The Fairy and the Hare, in which the hare's selflessness wins him immortality. Do you think of her as a selfless being in any way? Do you see a paradox between her love of those relatively placid stories and the violent life she actually lived?
I don't think Noor was more or less selfless than any of us. However, she was a dutiful and compassionate person who was very fearful of hurting or disappointing her family in any way, and afraid of penury should she be disowned. Those fears often make people act in ways that appear "self-less." However, Noor volunteered for war work so it's safe to presume that she, like so many others, was terribly angered by the exodus out of Paris and how the Germans strafed unarmed civilian refugees. So her movement in the direction of violence was an understandable reaction to the Nazi occupation of France and her childhood home, besides having the economic component -- having to survive as a refugee in London. Her motives are complex and paradoxical -- that makes her very interesting. Her work assisted the violence of the French resistance and from the police reports of the region, we know that civilian casualties resulted from their insurgency. So, of course, to the German occupiers of France in 1943, she was a very dangerous "terrorist." But it was Churchill who created and funded the SOE to help the French resistance help the Allies, so if you are anti-fascist, you would think of Noor as a resistant and a freedom fighter.

Are you closer to understanding Noor now, as a person?
It's for readers to judge if I came close to understanding her, and her life and times.