Daughter of Tamil Tigers roars to the top of the hip-hop charts

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Thu, May 05 2005

Tamil Tiger burning bright

Maya Arulpragasam, daughter of Tamal Tigers

roars to the top of the hip-hop charts

As the daughter of a militant Tamil freedom fighter, Maya Arulpragasam had a childhood unlike those of most budding pop stars. In 1983, when she was seven and living in her native Sri Lanka, civil war broke out. Her memories of the time remain vivid.

"People are fighting, your mum's crying, the army's returned, your dad's missing, your cousin's dead," she says. "What do you do You can't play out in the street 'cause it's dangerous. I used to sit and draw." Arulpragasam's mother escaped to London with her three children in 1986. Their new home was a poverty-stricken public housing estate, but the middle child wasn't going to let anything stop her from pursuing her creative ambitions.

"In England your opportunities are predetermined by what class you're in," she says. "Coming from Sri Lanka, I just didn't give a shit. I was like, 'No one's going to plonk me in the middle of somewhere and expect me to live like the dirtiest, poorest person in town', you know what I mean I just didn't want to be a victim."

She talked her way into Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in south London, where she studied film and fine art. A series of incidents led her to switch creative fields to music.

Maya Arulpragasam

The cool older guys who lived next door on the estate had turned her on to the ferocious hip-hop of Public Enemy and NWA in her early teens. After art school, she worked and became friends with Elastica frontwoman Justine Frischmann.

Through her, Arulpragasam met the provocative punkette Peaches, who inspired her to buy a Roland MC-505 drum machine. A holiday in the Caribbean gave her the final push.

"I kind of just wanted to work out why I wasn't musical," she says. "Cause so many people used to say that to me: 'How come you're really, sort of, tone deaf? You can dance and stuff like that, you obviously love music, but, you're really bad at it'. People wouldn't even let me sort of hum and stuff around them."

Ironically, those very people may be having trouble stopping themselves from humming to Arulpragasam's debut collection of infectious beats and rhymes, which she recorded under the name M.I.A.

Her album Arular was named after her father's activist handle. It's a brew of the political and the funky, as heavily influenced by the dance-hall sounds of the Caribbean as by Arulpragasam's unusual, intense upbringing: a call to arms with crisp beats, fuzzy bass effects and unshakeable melodic hooks.