New Delhi, Jan 25: 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.
The renowned journalist, author and Indophile breathed his last at a private hospital here on Sunday at the age of 90. He was ailing for some time and had been admitted to the Max Hospital in Saket for the past week.
Born in 1935 in Tollygunge, 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 to the BBC in 2001 after he was selected for a knighthood, Tully remembered England as “a very miserable place… dark and drab, without the bright skies of India”.
After taking up a theology course at Trinity College in Cambridge, the young Brit was inclined to become a priest and joined the Lincoln Theological College. But destiny had other designs for him.
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.
Tully was reintroduced to India when the BBC sent him as its correspondent to New Delhi in 1964, marking the beginning of a career with the English broadcaster for the next 30 years.
The 35-year-old was sent back to London in 1969 after the Indian government barred the BBC from operating in India after it broadcast “Phantom India”, a French documentary critical of the country.
After arriving in Delhi again in 1971, he was made the chief of bureau the next year and was responsible for covering the South Asia region, starting another leg of his journalistic career in India.
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.
Tully was awarded the Padma Shri in 1992, knighted in the New Year Honours list 2002 and received the Padma Bhushan in 2005.
His association with the BBC came to a partial end in 1994 after an event that can be seen as a reflection of his journalistic integrity.
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 then director general John Birt.
In response, Birt dismissed Mark Tully’s allegations as “old soldiers sniping at us with their muskets”. Tully resigned from the BBC in July 1994 but continued to host “Something Understood”, a programme about spirituality, on the BBC’s Radio 4, till it was discontinued in April 2019.
Without being directly employed by any news media, Tully remained active as a freelance journalist in Delhi and a keen observer of India’s social and political pulse.
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,” he wrote. (PTI)
