Mark Tully, the BBC’s ‘voice of India’, dies aged 90
43 minutes agoShareSaveAndrew WhiteheadShareSave
The broadcaster and journalist Sir Mark Tully – for many years known as the BBC's "voice of India" – has died at the age of 90.
For decades, the rich, warm tones of Mark Tully were familiar to BBC audiences in Britain and around the world – a much-admired foreign correspondent and respected reporter and
Throughout his life, he performed a balancing act: English, without doubt; but not – he insisted – an expat who was passing through India. He had roots there; it was his home. It's where he lived for three-quarters of his life.
Immediately after World War Two, at the age of nine, Tully came to Britain for his education. He studied history and theology at Cambridge and then headed to theological college with the aim of being ordained as a clergyman before he – and the church – had second thoughts.
He was sent to India for the BBC in 1965 – at first as an administrative assistant but in time he began to take on a reporting role. His broadcasting style was idiosyncratic, but his strength of character and his insight into India shone through.
Some critics said he was too indulgent of India's poverty and caste-based inequality; others admired his clearly expressed commitment to the religious tolerance upon which independent India was anchored. It's "really important to treasure the secular culture of this country, allowing every religion to flourish," he told an Indian newspaper in 2016. "… we must not endanger this by insisting on Hindu majoritarianism."
Tully was never an armchair correspondent. He travelled relentlessly across India and neighbouring countries, by train when he could. He gave voice to the hopes and fears, trials and tribulations, of ordinary Indians as well as the country's elite. He was as comfortable wearing an Indian kurta as in a shirt and tie.
He was expelled from India at 24 hours' notice in 1975 after the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, ordered a state of emergency. But he headed back 18 months later and had been based in Delhi ever since. He spent more than 20 years as the BBC's head of bureau in Delhi, leading the reporting not simply of India but of South Asia, including the birth of Bangladesh, periods of military rule in Pakistan, the Tamil Tigers' rebellion in Sri Lanka and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Over time, he became increasingly out of step with the BBC's corporate priorities, and in 1993 he made a much-publicised speech accusing the then director general, John Birt, of running the corporation by "fear". It marked a parting of the ways. Tully resigned from the BBC the following year. But he continued to broadcast on BBC airwaves notably as presenter of Radio 4's Something Understood, turning back to issues of faith and spirituality which had engaged him as a student.
Unusually for a foreign national, Tully was accorded two of India's top civilian honours: the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan. Britain too gave him recognition. He was knighted for services to broadcasting and journalism in the 2002 New Year's honours list. He described the award as "an honour to India".
He continued to write books about India – essays, analyses, short stories too, sometimes in collaboration with his partner, Gillian Wright. He lived unostentatiously in south Delhi.
Tully never gave up his British nationality but was proud also to become late in life an Overseas Citizen of India. That made him, he said, "a citizen of the two countries I feel I belong to, India and Britain".