New Delhi: Veteran journalist Mark Tully, considered a chronicler of India and an acclaimed author, breathed his last at a private hospital in New Delhi on Sunday, his close friend said. He was 90.
“Mourning Mark Tully, probably the greatest radio journalist of his generation who took India to the world & who gave the BBC the credibility it once had in India. Of his many books No Full Stops in India was brilliant in predicting what India would become. RIP,” Vir Sanghvi posted on X.
The award-winning journalist was ailing for some time and had been admitted to the Max Hospital in Saket for the past week, his friend said.
Tully was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on October 24, 1935, and was the chief of bureau for the BBC, New Delhi, for 22 years.
Son of the director of a railroad and partner in a holding company that owned a bank, an insurance firm, and tea plantations, his parents sent him to a boarding school in the the UK after the Second World War. He later took theology courses at Cambridge University and then entered a seminary, as reported by The Telegraph Online.
Tully returned to London in 1969, to head the Hindi service and then the West Asia service – for which he covered the Bangladesh War of Independence in 1971.
In 1971, Tully was appointed BBC correspondent in New Delhi, and named bureau chief a few years later, responsible for covering the South Asia region – which included India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. It was a post he held for twenty years, until his retirement in 1994. His distinctive voice, the voice of the BBC, was recognized and revered by generations of Indians.
An acclaimed author, Tully was also the presenter of the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Something Understood’.
He was knighted in 2002 and received the Padma Bhushan from the government of India in 2005.
