New Delhi: Sir Mark Tully, born on October 24, 1935, passed away at 90 years in New Delhi. Calcutta-born, British-Indian journalist Tully was somewhat of a legend in the sub-continent well before he retired from active journalism.Joining the BBC in 1964, the could-have-been-priest Tully worked for three decades before resigning in July 1994. He did so after a bitter feud with the BBC Director General John Birt, who was anxious to make the BBC less dependent on the many pillars that had established the British state broadcaster as an important part of South Asia’s information palette.Whether in the Emergency of 1975 or at the time of Indira Gandhi’s assassination, when news was sparingly available, the BBC, with Mark Tully at the helm was how many Indians made sense of events as they struggled with their shortwave radio sets to hear him get them the news. Mark Tully became a part of the national conversation after he was asked by the then-government of India to leave during the Emergency which had a declared censorship regime in place.Most epoch-shaping developments in South Asia remembered by South Asians are in large measure shaped by how Tully chose to report on them. India-Pakistan wars, the hanging of former Pakistan prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the 1984 Bhopal Gas tragedy and Operation Blue Star, the assassination of former PM Rajiv Gandhi and the destruction of the Babri Masjid.His colleague Andrew Whitehead termed him “a child of the British Raj” and has written of his evolution as a dogged reporter of the India story, eventually being known as BBC’s “voice of India.” He writes, of how “in the small north Indian city of Ayodhya in 1992, he faced a moment of real peril. He witnessed a huge crowd of Hindu hardliners tear down an ancient mosque. Some of the mob – suspicious of the BBC – threatened him, chanting “Death to Mark Tully”. He was locked in a room for several hours before a local official and a Hindu priest came to his aid.”The great man #MarkTully no more . Rest in peace my friend. pic.twitter.com/F1epUgpbNh— Ram Dutt Tripathi (@Ramdutttripathi) January 25, 2026He is the author of nine books, with the first being Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle (1985), co-authored with Satish Jacob, his colleague at the BBC. His last book was out in 2017, a set of stories from rural north India, Upcountry Tales: Once Upon A Time In The Heart Of India.Mark Tully was knighted in 2002 and received the Pada Bhushan in 2005. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1992.Analysts have often said that one of the reasons radio in India has never been allowed to be free, was because of the power and potential of the low-cost and easy to access medium driven home by stalwarts like Tully.In 1994 he worked for BBC’s Great Railway Journeys, “Karachi to The Khyber Pass”, travelling by train across Pakistan. A railway enthusiast, he also worked on “Steam’s Indian Summer”, a part of the World Steam Classics series. Since 1994, he had been based in New Delhi’s Nizamuddin, working as an independent journalist and broadcaster. He presented BBC Radio 4’s Something Understood, a weekly show, till 2019.He lived in India with his partner and fellow journalist, Gillian Wright. Both were fluent in Hindi and spoke a smattering of other Indian languages.Loved and admired by legions of admirers and younger colleagues, most vividly recall the simple address board for his Nizamuddin East residence in New Delhi that doubled as the BBC office for decades as simply reading ‘Mark Tully’. It didn’t need to spell out that it also was the headquarters in India of the British Broadcasting Corporation.It was only in 1994 that the BBC went onto occupy an independent Delhi office at the All India Fine Arts and Crafts Society at Rafi Marg.