There was never any question that Mark Tully loved India and was devoted to the country. His affection was deep-rooted and sometimes joyously unbuttoned. In 1983, when India won the World Cup for the first time, Tully was coming to visit his close friend and BBC colleague Satish Jacob in Old Delhi. The streets were jammed with people celebrating, and Jacob suddenly spied Tully running down the road, shouting triumphantly, “Hum World Cup jeet gaya! Hum sala world jeet gaya!” He then plunged into the crowd, dancing with a whisky bottle in one hand. As Jacob recalled with affection, “He then came in, and we finished the bottle.”
It is hard, in this age of social media and instant global communication, to appreciate the vast influence the BBC once wielded around the globe. News was not news until it had been confirmed on the Beeb. In many cases, the world saw India through, and only through, Tully’s eyes.
In India, the BBC World Service represented credibility. Rajiv Gandhi, then on a road trip in Bihar, refused to believe his mother Indira had been assassinated until he heard Tully confirm it on short-wave radio.
Yet Tully, who died Sunday at the age of 90 after a brief illness, was more than an authoritative BBC correspondent. “Tully’s name was synonymous with India to a degree that did not happen with colleagues serving in other posts around the world,” observed The Guardian.
On Monday, hundreds of mourners crowded New Delhi’s Lodhi crematorium to bid Tully a final farewell.
Tully was first and foremost a radio reporter, a medium that perfectly suited his gift for narrative, though he also made television appearances. He had his finger on the pulse of the country and was on the ground, reporting with clarity amid chaos, when the army entered the Golden Temple barefoot to root out Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his followers. It was, he said, “one of the most extraordinary battles in military history.” Tully and Jacob later wrote Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle, a vivid and important chronicle of the events.
Four months later, he covered the grim story of Mrs Gandhi’s murder by her Sikh guards and the anti-Sikh riots that engulfed Delhi afterwards. As mobs rampaged, Tully’s broadcasts relayed the horror of what was happening.
One of his biggest scoops came on the day Pakistan’s former prime minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was executed, Jacob noted. After receiving a tip-off that the hanging would take place at Rawalpindi Central Jail, now known as Adiala Jail, Tully broadcast from outside the prison, reporting that Bhutto had been hanged at dawn and describing the heavy security and secrecy surrounding the execution ordered by General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.
During the Emergency, Tully and the BBC took on a critical role. With strict censorship preventing Indian publications from reporting on government actions, the BBC became almost the only trusted source of information. Unsurprisingly, Tully was expelled from the country after a few months. By then, the BBC’s reach had multiplied dramatically with the arrival of transistor radios, which allowed broadcasts to penetrate deep into rural India.
Tully was born in Tollygunge, Calcutta, in 1935. “I am very proud not just of my connection with Calcutta but my connection with India,” he said. His father was an executive with a British company, and as a child, Tully lived a sheltered colonial life with little contact with Indians apart from domestic staff.
He later described his upbringing as an “extraordinarily privileged life,” noting that British families tried to keep their children culturally English. “Though I was born in India, I was taught how not to become an Indian,” he said, adding that his English nanny insisted they should not learn the servants’ language.
He later learned Hindi and said he would have spoken it even better than he did “if more people would speak to me in Hindi rather than English.” He was briefly sent to school in Darjeeling before being sent to Britain, where he was educated at Marlborough College.
He went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, and then began studying for the Anglican priesthood. He abandoned those efforts after a bishop told him he was too “baadmash” for ecclesiastical discipline, he recounted. Yet he remained deeply religious and said that living in India and “the fundamental fact that India has been a historic home to all the great religions” had convinced him that “there are many paths to God.”
He returned professionally to India in 1965, accepting a personnel job with the BBC in Delhi, but found it “too boring.” Broadcasting soon followed, and in the early 1970s he became the BBC’s bureau chief in India, a position he would hold for more than two decades, until 1993. Over those years, he became a familiar and trusted presence to listeners across the subcontinent.
He eventually fell out with BBC management after describing it as a “secretive monolith.” That ended his tenure as bureau chief but not his association with India. He continued reporting on India and wrote several well-regarded books on the country. He also contributed to a wide range of BBC programmes, including hosting Something Understood, a weekly show on religion and ethics, for nearly a quarter of a century until 2019.
While he visited England, it was not a place he wanted to live. The country, he said, “struck me as a very miserable place, dark and drab, without the bright skies of India.”
The depth of Tully’s fame in India became strikingly clear to documentary producer Frank Stirling in 2017, when the two collaborated on a film marking the 70th anniversary of Indian Independence. As The Guardian quoted Stirling, “he could not walk down the street without people coming up to him wanting to shake his hand.” Decades after his broadcasts made him a household name, Tully, with his towering frame, remained instantly recognisable.
That affection was again evident when Tully died in a Delhi hospital at age 90 on January 25. His death made front-page news across Indian newspapers, an extraordinary tribute for a British journalist. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued a condolence message, acknowledging the “connect with India” of Tully who had spent a lifetime listening to the country and telling its stories to the world.