Veteran journalist Mark Tully, a chronicler of India and an acclaimed author, breathed his last at a private hospital here on Sunday, his close friend said. Tully was 90.
"Mourning Mark Tully, probably the greatest radio journalist of his generation who took India to the world & who gave the BBC credibility in India. Of his many books No Full Stops in India was brilliant in predicting what India would become. RIP," Vir Sanghvi posted on X.
The award-winning journalist was ailing for some time and had been admitted to the Max Hospital in Saket for the past week.
Born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on October 24, 1935, Tully was the chief of bureau for the BBC, New Delhi, for 22 years.
His father was the director of a railroad and a partner in a holding company that owned a bank, an insurance firm, and tea plantations. After the Second World War, his parents sent him to boarding school in the United Kingdom. He later took theology courses at Cambridge University and then entered a seminary.
Tully returned to London in 1969, to head the Hindi service and then the West Asia service – for which he covered the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971.
In 1971, Tully was appointed BBC correspondent in New Delhi, and named bureau chief a few years later, responsible for covering the South Asia region – which included India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It was a post he held for twenty years, until his retirement in 1994. His distinctive voice, the voice of the BBC, was recognized and revered by generations of Indians.
His work with the broadcaster is underlined by coverage of historic episodes in post-Independence Indian history.
From the Bangladesh war of 1971 to the Emergency of 1975-77, the execution of former Pakistan president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979, Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, and the anti-Sikh riots in 1984, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, and the demolition of Babri Masjid in 1992.
Operation Blue Star and the Punjab problem were the subjects of Tully’s first book, “Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle” (1985), co-written with journalist Satish Jacob.
Tully’s first major book on his years in India came in 1988 in the form of “No Full Stops in India”, condensing his more than two decades of work in the country in a collection of 10 journalistic essays covering some of the prominent news events, including Operation Blue Star, Roop Kanwar Sati case, Ramanand Sagar’s “Ramayan”, and the Kumbh Mela that he witnessed in 1977.
“The stories I tell in this book will, I hope, serve to illustrate the way in which Western thinking has distorted and still distorts Indian life -- I might almost say they are parables. They provide no answers to India’s poverty, but I believe they do suggest where we should begin to look for those answers -- in India itself,” he wrote in the book’s introduction.
An acclaimed author, Tully was also the presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme 'Something Understood'.
He was knighted in 2002 and received the Padma Bhushan from the government of India in 2005.
In an interview to the BBC in 2001 after he was selected for Knighthood, Tully remembered England as “a very miserable place… dark and drab, without the bright skies of India".
As a child of rich British parents in West Bengal's Tollygunge in the late 1930s, Mark Tully was not allowed to socialise with locals.
As if in a karmic response to his parents' preferences, Tully spent a lifetime in India as a journalist and observer, mingling with its people and telling their stories, including from some of the most remarkable chapters in the country's eventful past.
Tully had spent the first decade of his life in India, studying at a boarding school in Darjeeling before he was sent off to England for further education.
In an interview with The UNESCO Courier in 2020, Tully remembered being “rather rebellious” and lasting at the seminary for only two terms.
“I thought I might have a calling to be a priest. I was always rather rebellious, and I didn’t like the discipline of the seminary. Also, I was a good beer drinker,” he said.
“He womanised and drank to excess: on his 21st birthday, he put 21 shillings on a pub par to buy 21 pints, all of which he duly downed,” the BBC noted in its article.
In a lecture to the Radio Academy in Birmingham, Tully said that “there is a very real sense of fear among the staff” at the BBC under John Birt.
In response, Birt dismissed Mark Tully's allegations as "old soldiers sniping at us with their muskets".
In another of his most noted works in 2002, “India in Slow Motion”, co-written with colleague and partner Gillian Wright, Tully covers a diverse range of subjects -- from Hindu extremism to child labour, Sufi mysticism to the crisis in agriculture, the persistence of political corruption to the problem of Kashmir.
In a total of 10 books, both fiction and non-fiction, Tully continuously centred India as his favourite subject.
In “India’s Unending Journey” (2008) Tully navigates India’s heterogeneity, while “India: The Road Ahead” is a reflective, on-the-ground assessment of India’s future.
His two fiction works, “The Heart of India” (1995) and “Upcountry Tales: Once Upon A Time In The Heart Of India” (2017), are collections of stories that are timeless in their Indianness.
On Tully’s 90th birthday on October 24, his son Sam Tully posted on LinkedIn, paying heartfelt tributes to his father’s long service to journalism.
“I think my father's achievements are particularly significant for UK-India ties because of his abiding ties and affection for both countries. While he lives in India, he has powerful connections to the UK as well. ‘Dill hai Hindustani, magar tora Angrezi bhi!’ The heart is Indian but a bit English too!” Sam wrote in the post.
Under the post, many recollected their memories of hearing Tully on the BBC World Service that made them trust a story’s veracity, calling him “the voice of truth”.
“During the India-Pakistan war in 1971, my family lived close to the Pakistan border. We used to pick up broadcasts from both sides. But we never believed anything until we heard Mark Tully say it on the World Service! Not just in wartime but all the time he was broadcasting we trusted him more than the state broadcaster. He was the voice of truth,” Sanjay Dighe wrote.
Ram Dutt Tripathi, a former BBC journalist, remembered his days working with Tully, especially during the Ayodhya dispute.
“I am privileged to have worked with him on many stories, including the Ayodhya dispute and elections. I think he is the only person who gets liberty to have his daily dose of beer in my house as I am a teetotaller. Your father is a great devotee of Lord Hanuman. Pray to Hanuman ji to give him good health and long life,” he wrote.