MIA isn’t MIA after all. The 34-year-old singer and songwriter of Sri Lankan origin — recently named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine — is actually called Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam. MIA (or M.I.A) stands for “Missing In Action,” inspired mainly by the civil war in Sri Lanka, which she has now adopted as her main cause from her base in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York. MIA grew up mostly in London, after her Tamil refugee parents sought asylum in Britain.

Not much is known about her father, Arul Pragasam, except that after an itinerant existence, living in Sri Lanka, Chennai and London, he returned to his roots when his children were very young to continue to be a Tamil activist-cum-freedom fighter. His backers have let it be known he was a founding member of the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students, a political group that wants an independent Tamil Eelam.

“My dad’s been a myth in my life,” MIA once admitted. “He never had a practical, physical influence. He used to come round once a year for 20 minutes at three in the morning. He’d wake you up and give you Rs 5 to buy an ice cream and then disappear. I felt like he didn’t even know what my name was. Sometimes people came up and said our dad is a great man. I used to feel really jealous — ‘I hate you, how can you know more about my dad than me’?”

In the eyes of MIA’s fans, her father’s background as a possible guerrilla fighter has made her appear even more exotic. MIA’s debut album in 2005 was Arular, which also happened to be her father’s political name. Both Rolling Stone and Time picked Arular, which had trendy artwork swarming with stencils of AK-47s and Molotov cocktails, as one of the 10 best albums of 2005. It was the time when MIA shifted base from Britain to the US.

Her photo shoots have played up her sexy, dark looks. In April 2009, the singer added a baby to her CV. Her boyfriend, Ben(jamin) Zachary Brewer (pic above), a musician in his own right under the name Ben Bronfman, used to be the lead guitarist for the band The Exit. He is a member of the wealthy Bronfman dynasty, a Jewish family that made its money from liquor.

MIA was quite cross when a celebrity website claimed the baby had been named “Ickitt”. Another website got hold of the birth certificate and found its first name was equally incomprehensible — Ikhyd Edgar Arular Bronfman.

MIA is still a bit of an enigma to her fans. A British newspaper said: “Her intelligence is cocky, fidgety, breathless, as if there’s too much to say and never enough time to say it. Whatever criticisms are levelled at her, she has already thought of them. ‘I knew people were going to ask, ‘What are you? A rapper? A dancehall artist?’ If I didn’t have my own style they’d have ripped me to shreds. But coming out as the first Sri Lankan artist in the West, what the f..k am I supposed to sound like? There’s no rules for me.’”

That’s true, for MIA never ceases to surprise. When she was 10, her mother, Kala, returned to London. Along with an older sister Kali and a younger brother Sugu, MIA lived in a council house in not very glamorous Mitcham in south London. She attended a comprehensive school and acquired street cred. To this day, she retains her broad south London accent.

There was clearly something plausible about the girl for she talked her way, despite appalling A level grades, into London’s prestigious and hard to get into Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, from where she graduated with a degree in fine art, film and video. Her period there probably set her on course to future fame and fortune and a career as a pop star.

In 2007, she brought out her equally well received second album Kala, which illustrated her gift for incorporating musical influences from all over the world, though some of the lyrics in support of liberation “wars”, as opposed to “terrorism”, meant the US authorities would not renew her visa for a while. But once as British as masala dosa, she is now as New York as bagel.

As a demonstration of what is known in America as “preg pride,” a heavily pregnant MIA performed at the Grammy Awards on February 8, 2009, three days before she gave birth. This was also the time when MIA flitted across the Indian consciousness because she was nominated with A.R. Rahman in the Best Song category in the Academy Awards for their collaboration Saya, from Slumdog Millionaire. She excused herself from making an appearance at the Kodak Theatre in Los Angeles on grounds of her pregnancy. Perhaps she also had a premonition that Rahman would beat himself and take the Oscar for the song Jai Ho.

It’s no surprise that Rahman also makes it to Time’s list of 100 most influential people in the world, which includes such luminaries as Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, “Hockey Mom” Sarah Palin and Nandan Nilekani of Infosys.

MIA’s nomination was explained on the ground that she had “global influence across many genres”. In a video interview shortly afterwards, MIA slightly reinvented herself, making a leap from the freedom struggle in Sri Lanka to her current status as almost a mascot for the Tamil movement in the West. “I left Sri Lanka in the ’80s and now I am here (in America),” she said. “I never thought of myself as really deep Tamil or something,” she went on. “I went on a holiday to Sri Lanka. The things that kids take for granted in England are something really important in Sri Lanka. I started making music. Some of those things came out in my music. That’s how it became kind of political for me. I can sing songs with gun shots in the background because I had heard them.”

She stresses her concern for human rights in Sri Lanka: “My music is a way of smoking out the hatred that has been bubbling underneath what’s going on in Sri Lanka. If there are 3,00,000 that are trapped and dying it should be talked about, it should be brought to the table, I don’t see anything wrong with sticking up for 3,00,000 dying people. I think the journey from the beginning as an artist for me has been to show that you can make the jump from being a refugee to whatever you want to be.”

In a sense, MIA encapsulates the American dream. She had to go to America to make it. In Britain, she might not have risen above the ranks of the talented also-rans. This is ironic because in 2005 she protested when the Mercury Music Prize in Britain went to the American band, Antony and the Johnsons — its lead singer, Anthony Hegarty, 34, had been born in Chichester in Britain. But since he moved to America at a young age, MIA felt the band — unlike her — was not actually British and should have been disqualified from the British-only contest. When Hegarty was given the prize, the very disappointed MIA, who was second favourite to win for Arular, behaved badly and walked out in protest.

Now America — and Time magazine — have embraced her with open arms. Far from being missing in action, the girl from south London has become a quasi political éminence grise on the US music scene.