Mark Tully (1935 - 2026): The Heartbeat of India

Indians have a special place in their hearts for Westerners who love them. From the days of Annie Besant, and even before, we love those who see us for all that we are--chaotic, complicated, conflicted, but also charming at times. Mark Tully was one such Angrezi Babu who loved the country he was born in, and whose joys and troubles he covered for decades. Much like Khushwant Singh's Sujan Singh Park home, Tully's I Nizamuddin East home was a magnet for any foreigner who wanted to understand India.

Any Indian too. Mark Tully was an Englishman who knew India as well as anyone born Indian. He had covered the 1971 War, the Emergency under Mrs Gandhi, when he had to leave India for 18 months, Pakistan, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Union Carbide calamity at Bhopal, Operation Blue Star, and the subsequent assassination of Mrs. Gandhi.

In the days before screaming anchors and forever breaking news, it was Mark Tully's dispatches with his trusty microphone and recorder that India waited for to confirm any news. BBC Radio had a lot of credibility, much more than India's own state owned media. Until he quit in 1994, Sir Mark had reported three decades of India, listening, talking, laughing, escaping mobs, and sometimes even, as he so famously recounted, a thrashing from Mrs Gandhi's minister.

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From 1995 to 2019, after retiring from reporting duties, he was the main presenter of the Radio 4 programme Something Understood, in which he explored the meaning of life through selections of poetry, prose and music. As a man who once trained to be a priest, it was an apt sinecure. But it was as the Voice of India, a country he continued to stay in till his passing on this week, that he was legendary.

His gravelly voice, toothy smile, his kind eyes and marvellous way of telling a story were uniquely Sir Mark. It was his journalism that many aspired to, in the days when journalism was still considered a profession where its practitioners spoke truth to power, by reporting what was happening in fields far and wide. Sir Mark was one of those journalists who was where the action was, whether it was the Tamil Tigers battling the Army in Sri Lanka or goons bringing down Babri Masjid in Ayodhya. He was an author, lover of Indian trains, and one of the world's most famous sign offs. If he had reported it, it had to be right, whether it was the death of Mrs Gandhi or later, the assassination of her son, Rajiv.

Video may have killed the radio star, but Mark Tully was forever.