One of Indira Gandhi’s advisers suggested she ‘pull down his trousers [and] give him a few lashes’, but he was adored by most Indian people
Sir Mark Tully, the journalist and broadcaster who has died aged 90, was, for a quarter of a century, the voice of India for BBC radio listeners; in India his name became a synonym for the quintessential foreign correspondent.
Tully’s love affair with India began in the 1960s when he was working as an administrator for the BBC in Delhi and began to report on small events after going on a course to learn how to operate a tape recorder. He made his name covering the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971 and was appointed bureau chief in Delhi the following year.
Tully’s commitment to the country produced coverage remarkable for its clarity, authority and understanding. No Western correspondent in India approached Tully in experience, and few could match his command of Hindi. Many in the foreign press corps in Delhi took the view that, since the Indian elite speak English, a knowledge of Hindi seemed unnecessary. In fact, only three per cent of Indians speak English. Tully took the time to get to know the other 97 per cent.
Tully’s BBC reports could sometimes grate on sensitivities. As probably the best-known English-language reporter on the subcontinent, he was chased by mobs screaming “Death to Mark Tully”; and he was expelled by one government and accused of bringing down another. Angry listeners picketed his home, broke his windows and threatened his life.
But to most ordinary Indians he was “Tully Sahib”, India’s best-loved Englishman and almost a cult figure in the region. He was decorated by both the Queen and the president of India. During Mrs Gandhi’s state of emergency in 1975, Tully’s pukka voice was the only one Indians could trust, as they listened to the BBC World Service under the bedclothes.
One of Mrs Gandhi’s leading advisers suggested that she should “send for Mark Tully, pull down his trousers, give him a few lashes, and send him to jail” – instead she expelled him. But when she was assassinated in 1984, her son Rajiv only accepted reports of her death when he heard Tully confirm the news.
In the 2004 Indian elections a poll revealed that 70 per cent of voters would have been happy to see Tully as prime minister.
A tall, rumpled figure with an unruly mop of black hair over a dome-like forehead, Tully had something of the well-meaning Edwardian district officer about him – down to a liking for cheap South Indian cheroots and Rosy Pelican beer. However, his popularity in India owed something to the fact that he was convinced that many of India’s problems lie in its colonial legacy.
The British, he came to believe, had acted in India for their own interests and left behind the deeply corrupting idea that British values were superior. This superiority, he argued, had been accepted by the country’s native English-speaking elite, whose admiration for the West had led them to despise their own people, culture and history. India’s sprawling and corrupt bureaucracy was also, in Tully’s view, a “malign influence inherited from the British”.
In arguing that India should look for solutions in its own past, however, Tully controversially took issue with those who regard traditions such as the caste system as evil. He saw it more positively, as providing ordinary Indians with a code for living, community, identity, kinship and self-respect.
He even took issue with western feminists who made a cause célèbre of a woman who had immolated herself on her husband’s funeral pyre in a rare case of suttee. While not condoning the practice, Tully saw it as nothing to do with the sex war, but as a complex issue involving respect for tradition.
One of six children, William Mark Tully was born in Calcutta on October 24 1935 and grew up in an exclusive area of the city, a tree-lined avenue called Regent Park. Tully’s father, William, was a box wallah – a West Country businessman who had moved to India and become number two in an Anglo-Indian investment company. His mother, Patience, had been born in what is now Bangladesh, to a family whose associations with India went back several generations.
Tully’s European nanny had strict instructions to ensure that her charges did not “go native”. Although he came into contact with the family’s 13 Indian servants, there was no question of making Indian friends and he never saw the slums in which so many ordinary Indians lived.
Nevertheless, the oddities of the country somehow found their way under his skin: “I would go out for my morning walk with nanny and see people performing their morning offices quite openly: a guy washing his bottom after he’d been to the loo, or cleaning his teeth with bits of twig.”
At the age of four Tully was sent to boarding school in Darjeeling, which he loved, but when he was 10 the family returned to “miserable, dark, drab” England. After a few years as a “layabout” at Marlborough College, he joined the Army, accidentally set fire to his own tank, and arrived with a sense of relief at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, “my first real taste of freedom”.
He studied Theology under Robert Runcie and then enrolled at Lincoln Theological College to train as a priest, but dropped out after a couple of terms: “The bishop told me I liked wine, women and song too much and that my face was more appropriate in the pub than in the pulpit. And the late Brian Redhead once said I was one of those people who looked for God in the bottom of a glass.”
He taught for a while, then for four years worked with the Abbeyfield housing charity in Cheshire: “There was a row between the founder and the director. I sided with the loser, and resigned”.
The loss of an outlet for his strong religious faith left a hole in Tully’s life, which was eventually filled by India. He joined the BBC in 1964 and was posted to Delhi soon afterwards: “Just after I arrived, sitting on the hotel verandah, I smelt the gardener’s food: it brought memories of my childhood flooding back. I suddenly sensed I had a root.”
After 22 years as bureau chief in Delhi, in 1994 Tully dramatically resigned from the BBC in protest at the way the corporation was heading under its director-general John Birt, who was said to have referred to Tully at a private dinner (at which Tully was present), as the “Delhi branch manager” and made other contemptuous remarks.
The BBC had reportedly been trying to oust Tully from his Delhi perch for some time due to his opposition to changes in the corporation during the renegotiation of its charter. When they tried to get him to sign a “gagging clause” in a new contract, Tully responded with suicidal defiance. In 1993 he made a speech in Birmingham in which he vehemently denounced the BBC’s “Big Brother administration” and accused Birt of heading a regime “run on fear and sycophancy” and of turning the BBC into “a secretive monolith with poor ratings and a demoralised staff”.
Tully’s assault sparked a series of proxy skirmishes within the BBC. The World at One devoted half its time the following day to examining his criticisms, and two days later Tully voiced his views on The World This Weekend. Subsequently, however, he was done over by The Late Show, reputedly one of the most Birtist corners of the Corporation, which recruited a cast drawn from the Indian establishment to accuse Tully of losing journalistic objectivity, defending the caste system and lacking intellectual rigour.
But it seemed the BBC could not do without him. After going freelance, Tully was invited, via an independent broadcasting company, to present Something Understood, a weekly programme of ethical and spiritual reflection that ran on Sunday mornings on Radio 4 for 24 years until it fell victim to budget cuts in 2019.
Tully wrote several books conveying his deep affection for his adopted country, including India in Slow Motion (2002, co-written with his partner Gillian Wright); No Full Stops in India (1991); From Raj to Rajiv (1988); India’s Unending Journey (2007); Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle (1985); and a collection of stories titled Upcountry Tales (2017). He also wrote The Lives of Jesus (1996) to accompany a four-part series he presented on BBC One, and Four Faces: A Journey in Search of Jesus the Divine, the Jew, the Rebel, the Sage (1997).
Mark Tully was appointed OBE in 1985 and knighted in 2002. He was awarded the Indian Padma Shree in 1992 and the Padma Bhushan in 2005.
Tully, who lived out his final years quietly in south Delhi, once said that the fictional character with whom he most identified was the Whisky Priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Some saw other elements of Greene in Tully’s complicated private life, which he divided between his companion in India, Gillian Wright, and his wife Margaret in London, to whom he remained married and with whom he had two sons and two daughters.
Sir Mark Tully, born October 24 1935, died January 25 2026