New Delhi: Sir Mark Tully, the writer and journalist who steered BBC’s bureau in Delhi for more than two decades died Sunday at the age of 90.
He had been under treatment at the Max Super Speciality Hospital in Saket for the past week. The cause of death, according to a statement by the hospital, was multi-organ failure following a stroke.
Tully was born in West Bengal’s Tollygunge on 24 October 1935. He spent his early years in India before relocating to England for his schooling. His father was a businessman. On his mother’s side, several generations had spent time in India as traders or administrators.
In an interview with Malavika Banerjee of Daakbangla, Tully once famously described himself as “the last relic of the [British] Raj”.
He joined the BBC in 1964 and moved to India after he became its South Asia correspondent in 1965. He spent the next three decades covering India for the BBC, the last 20 years as its bureau chief in Delhi.
During the Emergency, he was expelled from India at 24 hours’ notice.
He was fluent in Hindi and wrote many books about India, among them Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s last battle (1985), No full stops in India (1991) and Upcountry Tales (2017).
Tully parted ways with the BBC in 1994 and became a freelance journalist and author based out of New Delhi. Although he never gave up his British nationality, he applied for and obtained an Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) card, which allowed him to stay indefinitely within the country. He described holding the OCI status as being a citizen of the two countries he felt he belonged to: India and the UK.
The President of India in 1992 conferred on him the Padma Shri, the fourth-highest civilian award in the country. In 2005, he was awarded the Padma Bhushan, the third-highest civilian award in India. He was also knighted by Queen Elizabeth II with a KBE for services to broadcasting and journalism in 2002.
Tully continued to write about India—essays, analyses, short stories too, sometimes in collaboration with his partner, Gillian Wright.
Anant Tanikella is an alum of ThePrint School of Journalism currently interning with ThePrint
(Edited by Amrtansh Arora)
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