PRIZE VOICE: Maya Arulpragasam

Mercury rising over Maya

The biggest thing to come out of Sri Lanka since Muttiah Muralitharan is probably singer-song writer Maya Arulpragasam, 27, a London-born Tamil who has just been shortlisted for the Mercury Prize.

She sings under the name M.I.A, which is not Mia (as in Mia Farrow) but is inspired by the turbulence of Sri Lanka and refers to “Missing In Action”.

Her debut album is called Arular, named after her father, Arul Pragasam, who has certainly been missing from Maya’s life since he continues his revolutionary existence somewhere in Sri Lanka while his wife and children are based in Britain.

Arular is one of 12 albums shortlisted for the Mercury Prize which honours emerging musical talent in Britain. In 1999, Nitin Sawhney, the classical guitar player, was nominated for Beyond Skin, as was the eventual winner, the percussionist, Talvin Singh, with OK.

The Mercury Prize, to be announced on September 6, is voted on by a panel of music industry experts, journalists and artists, who selected 12 nominees from more than 170 entries.

Maya has been making waves for over a year both in Britain, where she was born in Hounslow, west London, in 1978, and in the US, where she now spends much of her time. In some ways, she is the most high-profile Asian name in world music since Norah Jones.

Her influences include an “explosive mix” of “grime, bhangra, hip hop, techno and reggae, all fused with its own particular electronic wizardry”.

After she was born in London, her parents shifted back to Sri Lanka. But in 1986, during a particularly violent phase in the civil war, she fled the island with her mother, sister and brother, while her father stayed on. In England, Maya grew up in impoverished circumstances on a council estate, before getting a place at the St Martin’s School of Art.

Her father is not a Tamil Tiger but belongs to another group, Eros, which does not apparently believe in violence. But he trained with the PLO in Lebanon.

Today his daughter sings: “Like PLO I don’t surrendo, I’ve got the bombs to make you blow.”

GENTLE SOUL: I.G. Patel

To sir, with love

Indraprasad Gordhanbhai (IG) Patel, who died in New York, aged 80, is being remembered fondly by his friends in London, where he was director of the London School of Economics from 1984-90.

Margaret Thatcher, who happened to be in India for a meeting of the Commonwealth heads of government, was introduced to IG at a party in Delhi: “This is Dr I.G. Patel who is proceeding to UK as director of your LSE.”

Mrs Thatcher affected mock displeasure that an Indian was succeeding a German, Ralf Dahrendorf, as director: “Ah, the LSE! They always pick foreigners.”

One wit has it that IG accepted the LSE post because his daughter, Rehana, wanted to go to Cambridge and his wife, Alaknanda, wanted to be near their daughter.

According to another anecdote, Manmohan Singh, who succeeded IG as governor of the Reserve Bank, was in the habit of addressing him always as “Sir”.

When IG called on his friend last year in Delhi, he still called the former, “Sir”.

IG protested: “You are Prime Minister now. I should be calling you, ‘Sir’.”

To which, the PM replied: “Do that if you like but I shall always call you ‘Sir’.”

After the Gujarat riots, which deeply upset him, IG, who lived in Baroda, got his friends in London, the peers, Bhikhu Parekh, Navnit Dholakia and Meghnad Desai, to urge overseas Gujaratis not to send money to the Modi government.

I am told that IG and his father-in-law, the late Professor Amiya Kumar Dasgupta, shared a mutual admiration for Mahatma Gandhi.

Alaknanda is said to be putting together her father’s personal papers for publication.

IG certainly married into an academic family ? his brother-in-law, Sir Partha Sarathi Dasgupta, based at St John’s College, Cambridge, is the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics at the university.

VOICE OF REASON: Sir Edward Heath

Finest hour

Sir Edward Heath, who was Prime Minister from 1970-74, has died at the age of 89.

A group of Thatcherite journalists put it about that he was a sour puss who never stopped sulking after being ousted by Margaret Thatcher as Tory party leader. Yet, I found him to be different.

During one general election, when I had been following him from meeting to meeting for a whole day, he suddenly stopped his own car, came over to me and said: “Dinner?”

In Delhi one evening, he recalled over dinner, he caught up with Indira Gandhi after she had returned from a day’s electioneering in Madras.

Heath confided to Mrs Gandhi that he was lucky if he got 100 at any of his meetings. How many did she get, he wondered.

She admitted her meeting in Madras had been disappointingly small. “Not more than 100,000,” she said.

The last time I spoke to Heath was in 1997 when Britain marked the 25th anniversary of the arrival in UK of 30,000 Ugandan-Asian refugees, mainly of Indian origin, who had been expelled by Idi Amin.

Enoch Powell and the Right wing of the Conservative Party had opposed the admission of the British passport holders on the grounds that they were not “kith and kin” (that is, white). But Heath felt Britain had a moral and legal responsibility and let them in, and, in time, they helped transform the British economy.

I relayed to Heath what many former refugees had told me over the years ? that the events of a quarter of a century before had marked his finest hour.

He was slightly embarrassed in the way old-fashioned Englishmen are when praised but also moved.

“Very kind of you to say so,” he acknowledged gruffly. “I did what needed to be done,” he added.

Colour of blood

Enoch Powell died in 1998, 30 years after he had made his famous/notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech, slamming “coloured” immigration.

“As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’,” he said, including an allusion to Virgil.

He added: “It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.”

The next day Ted Heath sacked him from the Tory front bench.

Where Powell’s analysis went badly wrong was in lumping all non-white immigrants together. How to reconcile an uncompromising brand of Pakistani Islam into the fabric of what still remains essentially a Christian though outwardly secular culture may be a problem without an apparent solution. But if anyone can make it work, it will be the British.

Tittle tattle

A Muslim district judge, Shamim Qureshi, has passed sentence in a case which has become almost the biggest talking point in Britain after the bombs.

Paul Pugh, 39, twisted off the head of his pet Senegal parrot after a row with his wife at their home in Wolverhampton (once Enoch Powell’s constituency).

Jailing him for five-and-a-half months, Qureshi said: “This has all the hallmarks of pop stars on stage.” Some Brits, who want to “understand” the London bombers, believe the parrot killer should have been given life.