Illustration: Ashoke Mullick

Call him what you will. Some know him as Tully Sa’ab, and some as Sir Mark. Most would rather address him as Sir Tully — Indians, after all, would think it impolite to call him by his first name. But Mark Tully, arguably the best known broadcast journalist in India, is not troubled. Instead, he revels in the many vignettes — reflected perhaps in the various forms of address — that is India.

For someone who has lived in India for almost 45 years — with occasional stints in England — he is possibly more Indian than many in his neighbourhood. Yet Tully is impeccably British as well. And that’s possibly why he loves to explore the dichotomy of India. “I believe in karma. My karma was to be born British — and you can’t lose that,” he says. “I would love to be an Indian citizen. But in this country you cannot have dual nationality.”

The two perspectives — of the outsider and the insider — run through his new book Non Stop India which comes 20 years after the much acclaimed No Full Stops in India. It zeroes in on subjects that define India’s dual nature. Every chapter is a peek into a conflicting little corner of India — from the rise of Dalits and the success of the Tatas to the problems of tigers and the violence in Maoist land.

“As the book says, India is not a failing State, but a flailing State,” says Tully, once the face and voice of the BBC in India.

We are sitting in his living room in Nizamuddin West. A small tray on his table — spilling over with all kinds of boxes, bowls and plates — holds a small heap of shiuli or harsingar, embracing the room with its sweet autumnal fragrance. The star-shaped flowers are from his own tree in the front yard, Tully points out.

In another corner of the room stand the objects that he is most fond of — tiny models of railway engines and trains. He gives a guided tour of the trains, pointing them out and naming them one by one. Tully, whose father was in the Railways in India as a director on deputation before India’s Independence, loves the railways. He reads railway timetables for fun — and travels by train whenever he can.

One such journey was particularly memorable. When the BBC posted him back to England in 1969 after four years in India, he decided to take the long way home. “I honestly thought I wouldn’t come back. So one of the things I ceremoniously did was to make sure I didn’t travel one inch of the way by air,” he says.

So the Tullys — four children in tow — went from Delhi to Bombay on the old Punjab Mail. “Then we took the boat from Bombay, which was wonderful because the Suez Canal was closed and we went all the way around Africa and ended up in Venice. Then they took the train from Venice to Calais, a boat from Calais to Dover, and a train from Dover to London. It took him six weeks to get to England — “but it was great fun, and I never regretted it”.

Clearly, his life — along with his work — is all about journeys. His new book takes him to various spots in India. “We particularly wanted to travel in areas where there wasn’t much change. We had the Tata chapter to show what India can achieve, and other chapters which we saw as the problem areas,” he says.

The “we” is a reference to him and his partner of almost 30 years, writer-translator Gillian Wright. They met when they were both at the BBC, and have been together since. Wright, who translated Srilal Shukla’s Raag Darbari into English, knows Hindi well. Tully reads the Hindi papers, but is now trying to grope his way through two of Mahasweta Devi’s books translated into Hindi.

But he speaks in Hindi with his two Labradors. “Door ho jao,” he says fondly to Soni, daughter of Mishti — originally called Missy by her owners. “But we didn’t like the name, and we thought she was sweet, so we changed it to Mishti. Now she doesn’t respond to Missy,” he says.

Mishti belonged to a friend who wanted them to adopt her. But Tully and Wright were not keen for their own Labrador had then just died. Mishti went to somebody else, but was not happy. The friend approached them again, and then late one night Mishti arrived from Mirzapur. “That’s almost halfway to Bengal,” he points out.

Bengal crops up often in his conversation. His mother was a Bengali, he says, referring to the fact that she was born in Bangladesh. His grandfather was a jute broker, who started with indigo. His chartered accountant father, he says, was a Calcutta man for 22 years, working for the British Gillander Corporation, which the senior Tully often described as the oldest and biggest managing agency.

Tully was born in Calcutta — and remembers the toy train that took him to Darjeeling where he studied in a school set up for children of the Raj during World War II. He was almost 10 when he left India for England in 1945. “In England, I went through all the usual British nonsense, you know — public school, army and all that,” he says.

When he came back to India in 1965, it was to join as an administrator in the BBC, but he’d soon “manipulated” his way into becoming a journalist. Expelled from India during the Emergency after the BBC refused to sign India’s censorship rules, Tully persuaded his bosses to send him back to India after Indira Gandhi announced fresh elections.

Over the decades, Tully has reported on elections, assassinations, coalitions, religion and caste and a host of other topics — earning a Padma Shri and a Padma Bhushan along the way. Even now, though 76-year-old Tully only does occasional reports, he still occupies the high table of foreign correspondents.

Possibly every white male foreign correspondent in India has at some point of time been mistaken for Tully. One BBC reporter from England was more than a little piqued when he went into the countryside for a story, and found the locals muttering the name Mark Tully. “They think you are Mark Tully,” the interpreter explained to the puzzled reporter. “So this grand reporter got quite angry and said: ‘Tell them, I am much more famous than Mark Tully.’”

But his fame in India, he stresses, was a “historical accident”. He started broadcasting when there was only state-run All India Radio and Doordarshan, which was still to expand. The transistor — much cheaper than the radio — had come in, making radio listening more widespread. “If I had been broadcasting during the days when television had been liberated, I wouldn’t have been nearly as well known.”

Well known he became — and continues to be long after the advent of satellite television. Over the years, he also came close to top politicians. He was a particular friend of Vishwanath Pratap Singh’s brother, Sant Bux Singh. He was also fond of Devi Lal, who, he remembers, had “a wonderful way” of speaking.

Tully now mimics the Haryana Jat leader’s gravelly baritone. “‘Tully Sa’ab, aaiye, sabse bara jalsa hoga Rohtak mein. Aapkey liye helicopter bhej dunga (Come for my meeting in Rohtak, it will be the biggest ever — I’ll send my helicopter for you),’ he said. I used to say, ‘Choudhary Sa’ab, I am very fond of you, but I am not on your side, I am not allowed to be on your side.”’

Former Prime Minister Morarji Desai was another favourite. Tully recalls how he found it difficult to ask him a question about his habit of drinking his own urine — which he believed was beneficial to health — while shooting a documentary on him. “I came very hesitantly to this point. ‘Prime Minister, you’ve never made any secret that for your health you drink your own urine’. He said, ‘Yes, yes. How old are you?’”

Tully was then in his mid-forties. I am 82, Morarji retorted, and how do I look? “He had this wonderful and translucent skin, and was wearing a pressed white khadi kurta. Without thinking, I replied, I think you probably look rather better than I do. Desai laughed and said he had written a book about drinking which hadn’t sold too many copies. ‘But now it is the Prime Minister’s book, and it’s selling quite a lot.’”

Tully is also close to Bharatiya Janata Party leader L.K. Advani, and has sometimes been accused of leaning towards the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. “It troubles me because it’s not true. I know Advani very well. I actually, you know, like him as a human being very much. But I don’t share his views entirely any more than I share the views of someone like Digvijaya Singh in the Congress, though I happen to like him too. You don’t get accused of anything if you have a conversation with Digvijaya Singh, but if you have anything to do with Hinduism, then you know.”

The reference is to his espousal of Hinduism, which kicked up a controversy in media and political circles. “When I came here I was a traditional Christian — there was only one way to God,” Tully says. “I now do not believe that. You learn in India to be suspicious of uncertainties.”

Today, Tully says he is a “bit of — what should I call it — a balance freak”. The one “great lesson” he has learnt in India is, find “balance in everything, balance in life.”

For Tully, life in India is certainly not about full stops. A comma here, a question mark there — that’s India for him.