Sir William Mark Tully (B2 1949-53), better known as Mark, sadly died on 25 January 2026, aged 90 at a hospital in New Delhi. He was born in Tollygunge, Calcutta, India, 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. His mother had been born in Bengal. Tully spent the first decade of his childhood in India, but at the age of four, he was sent to a British boarding school in Darjeeling, before continuing his schooling in England from the age of nine. There he was educated at Twyford School in Hampshire, Marlborough College and at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he studied Theology. He married Margaret, with whom he had four children during the 1960s and later lived in Delhi with his girlfriend, Gillian Wright.
After university, Tully toyed with the idea of becoming a priest in the Church of England but decided to join the BBC in 1964 & move back to India in 1965 where he worked as the corporation’s India correspondent. His career with the BBC lasted for 30 years. As a correspondent, he covered all the major incidents in South Asia during his tenure, ranging from Indo-Pakistan conflicts, Bhopal gas tragedy, Operation Blue Star (and the subsequent assassination of Indira Gandhi, anti-Sikh riots), the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi to the demolition of Babri Masjid. He was expelled from India shortly after Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency and began ruling by decree in 1975; but returned a year and a half later shortly before the restoration of normality in the country.
In 1992, when covering the demolition of the Babri Masjid by Hindutva activists, some of the perpetrators confronted him, chanting “Death to Mark Tully”, reflecting their distrust of the BBC. Tully was locked in a room until a local official and a Hindu priest helped him leave several hours later; he later said that the demolition was India’s “greatest setback” to secularism as an independent nation. He resigned from the BBC in July 1994 after an argument with the director general, John Birt.
From 1994, he worked as a freelance journalist and broadcaster based in New Delhi.
He presented an episode of BBC’s Great Railway Journeys, “Karachi to The Khyber Pass”, travelling by train across Pakistan. A well-known railway enthusiast, he also presented “Steam’s Indian Summer” and was the regular presenter of the weekly BBC Radio 4 programme Something Understood until the BBC announced its end in 2019.
Unusually for a foreign national, Sir Mark was accorded two of India’s top civilian honours: the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan. Britain too gave him recognition. He was knighted for services to broadcasting and journalism in the 2002 New Year’s honours list. He described the award as “an honour to India”.
Sir Mark never gave up his British nationality but was proud also to become late in life an Overseas Citizen of India. That made him, he said, “a citizen of the two countries I feel I belong to, India and Britain”.
