Mark Tully is no more :::::: I interviewed Mark Tully ---- a great journo and greatness of Indian journalism at Parliament Street .... I was pulled up by PTI bosses -- "Who gave you the idea of interviewing Mark Tully"

Sir William Mark Tully, celebrated BBC journalist is no more.

He was truly the BBC's 'voice of India'.

Born 24th October, 1935; he expired on Saturday, Jan 25, 2026.

He is well known as a British-Indian journalist and the former Bureau Chief of BBC, New Delhi.

More important, perhaps, Tully’s BBC World Service dispatches--first broadcast in English and then rebroadcast in Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Nepali and Bengali--are the most reliable source of unfiltered, uncensored news about major events for untold millions in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Radio and TV are critically important in countries with low literacy rates. And now Tully’s reports for BBC television, broadcast on Hong Kong’s Star TV, go by cable or housetop satellite dishes into 1 1/2 million Indian homes as well.

It is why, alone among correspondents, Tully is known universally by the respectful colonial-era term: Tully Sahib. His fame is such that virtually every foreign reporter who goes to India is approached by someone asking hopefully, “BBC? Tully Sahib?” 

The Far Eastern Economic Review has called him a “cult figure” in the region.

Tully held the illustrious position for 20 years. Tully worked with the BBC for 30 years before resigning in July 1994

He authored several books. 

Tully was born in Tollygunge, British India (Bengal) on 24 October 1935. 

His father was a British businessman who was a partner in one of the leading managing agencies of the British Raj. 

He spent the first decade of his childhood in India, although without being allowed to socialise with Indian people; at the age of four, he was sent to a "British boarding school" in Darjeeling, before going to England for further schooling from the age of nine. There he was educated at Twyford School (Hampshire), Marlborough College and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied Theology.  

Tully's first book on India 

'Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi's Last Battle' (1985) was co-authored with his colleague at BBC Delhi, Satish Jacob; the book dealt with the events leading up to Operation Blue Star.

Indian army carried out the unprecedented operation between 1 and 8 June 1984 to remove militant religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale and his followers from the buildings of the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) complex in Amritsar.

His next book 'Raj to Rajiv: 40 Years of Indian Independence' was written with Zareer Masani, and was based on a BBC radio series of the same name. 

In the US, this book was published under the title India: Forty Years of Independence.

Tully's No Full Stops in India (1988), a collection of journalistic essays, was published in the US as The Defeat of a Congress-man. 

The Independent wrote that "Tully's profound knowledge and sympathy .. unravels a few of the more bewildering and enchanting mysteries of the subcontinent."

Tully's only work of fiction, The Heart of India, was published in 1995.

After Cambridge, Tully intended to become a priest in the Church of England but abandoned the vocation after just two terms at Lincoln Theological College, admitting later that he had doubts about "trusting [his] sexuality to behave as a Christian priest. 

(wikipedia) 

The BBC’s Battered Sahib : Mark Tully has been expelled by India, chased by mobs and picketed. He loves his job. - reported Los Angeles Times  

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. (reports BBC) 

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.