Adieu Sir Mark Tully: The Englishman Who Never Left India

 

Sir William Mark Tully passed away on 25 January 2026.

KBE. Former BBC Bureau Chief in India for two decades. A BBC journalist for over thirty years. Winner of numerous awards. Author of nine books.

All this is known. All this will be written, recorded, archived.

And yet, none of it quite captures the man.

In the days following his passing, I read deeply moving obituaries written by friends whom I admire. Rajendra Aklekar, journalist with Mid-Day and chronicler of India’s rail history and heritage. Deepak Sapra, one of the most outstanding alumni of my railway alma mater and author of the much-loved The Boy Who Loved Trains. Incidentally, Sir Mark wrote the foreword to their books, as he did to mine, My Train 18 Story. Reading their tributes stirred something personal in me. I felt compelled to write, not merely because Sir Mark was a towering journalist, but because he had left an indelible imprint on my own life and thinking.

What truly set Mark Tully apart, what made him singular and irreplaceable, was not just what he reported, but how and from where he reported. He did not merely cover India. He belonged to it. He consciously stepped away from the BBC’s often distant and patronising gaze and chose instead to look at India from within, as one of its own. He wrote not as a foreign correspondent passing judgement, but as a deeply involved participant, guided by affection, humility, and an unyielding moral compass.

Mark Tully once said it was his karma to live in India. He believed this country had shaped the way he lived, the way he thought, and the way he understood fate. Very few outsiders ever acknowledge India with such honesty. Fewer still allow it to change them so completely.

Among his many works, No Full Stops in India, which was his first work that I read,  stands apart, not merely as a book, but as a worldview. It is journalism, autobiography, travelogue, and social analysis seamlessly woven together. It refuses easy conclusions. It resists tidy summaries. It insists that India cannot be boxed into headlines or reduced to convenient theories. The title itself is a declaration. India has no full stops. Its stories do not end neatly. Its contradictions coexist. Order and chaos walk side by side. Tradition and modernity argue, collide, and yet somehow embrace.

Mark Tully’s greatest strength lay in his refusal to simplify India for foreign consumption. Instead of explaining India away, he allowed its complexity to breathe. His observations were shaped by insight and lived experiences, by patient watching and quiet listening. For anyone who wishes to understand India beyond clichés, No Full Stops in India remains essential reading.

His journeys along the Grand Trunk Road were, in many ways, journeys through India’s bloodstream. That ancient highway was not merely a reporting location. It was a living archive of centuries. Along it, he encountered faith and commerce, decay and renewal, rupture and continuity. Through his writing and documentaries, the Grand Trunk Road became a metaphor for India itself, always moving, always layered, carrying history without being imprisoned by it.

If one thread ran quietly but persistently through Mark Tully’s life, it was his love for trains. That love began in the misty hills of Darjeeling during the war years, when he could not return to England. As a schoolboy at the New School, he travelled daily on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway. Decades later, he recalled it with undimmed wonder: “How could I ever forget the DHR? It was the train that took me to school every day.”

The narrow gauge line, the loops and zigzags, the patient little locomotives climbing steep gradients, this was not merely transport. It was an initiation. The train passed through markets, tea gardens, and crowded streets, dissolving the boundary between railway and town. That was where his lifelong romance with Indian trains began.

When he later returned as BBC’s India chief, that relationship deepened. He believed the best way to understand India was to travel by train, preferably in sleeper class. There, strangers shared food, arguments, opinions, and silences. Languages mingled. Social hierarchies blurred. A railway coach became a moving microcosm of India.

Mark Tully often compared Indian trains to Indian life itself. Sometimes late. Often chaotic. Occasionally exasperating. Yet always collective, and always capable of sudden, unexpected beauty. His affection for steam engines was especially poignant. To him, they were living beings, breathing, sweating, struggling forward with dignity. Their disappearance saddened him deeply.

In many ways, his relationship with trains mirrored his relationship with India. Rooted in childhood, sustained by curiosity, and carried through life with enduring love.

I became a fan of Mark Tully not merely because he was a great journalist, but because he was, in spirit, more Indian than Indians. He neither romanticised India nor dismissed it. He respected it enough to criticise it honestly, and loved it enough to defend what deserved defending.

On 24 February 2019, writing in Hindustan Times, Mark Tully argued forcefully that Train 18, later known as Vande Bharat Express, should not be dismissed as elitist. He recognised it as an ambitious and indigenous effort by the engineers of the Integral Coach Factory, Chennai, after decades of sterile debate within Indian Railways on the need for modern trains.

When that very team was later humiliated and victimised by a venal and jealous section of senior railway officialdom, Mark Tully spoke again. On 12 January 2020, he wrote with rare moral clarity about what the Train 18 episode revealed about India. He condemned the lack of respect for achievement, the misuse of vigilance machinery, and the culture of fear that discourages initiative. He warned that such treatment would encourage a dangerous habit within government organisations: the habit of doing nothing, agreeing to nothing, risking nothing.

His words cut deep because they were true. And because they came from someone with no personal stake, only a stake in India’s future.

His writing on Train 18 emboldened me to meet him at his Delhi home. He received me with warmth and grace. He listened with care and understood fully, even as I emptied a copious number of chilled beers that kept appearing on the table, courtesy Gillian, his gracious partner. With characteristic generosity and courage, he offered to write again on the subject, which he did, fully aware that the powers that be would not take kindly to such forthrightness and that it would further estrange him from them. From that moment grew a relationship marked by kindness, encouragement, and a shared concern for Indian Railways and the health of Indian institutions.

He agreed to write the foreword to my book My Train 18 Story, and did so with extraordinary insight. In it, he placed my experience within a larger national malaise: the colonial legacy, rigid hierarchies, fear driven bureaucracy, and what Inder Malhotra once called the Abominable Indian No Men. With precision and compassion, he showed how initiative is punished and conformity rewarded, not only in the railways, but across Indian governance.

Sir Mark Tully’s passing is not merely the loss of a legendary journalist. For me, it is deeply personal. It is the loss of a moral voice, a generous mentor, and a fellow traveller.

From now on, every train journey will carry his presence for me. In shared compartments, in the rhythm of wheels on rails, in the stubborn persistence of Indian Railways despite everything, I will sense his spirit: curious, patient, empathetic, and endlessly in love with the journey itself.

Adieu, Sir Mark Tully. You did not merely write about India. You walked its roads, rode its trains, shared its silences, and earned your place within its heart.

And to borrow from Shakespeare, a line that seems written for him:

“His life was gentle; and the elements so mix’d in him, that Nature might stand up and say to all the world, This was a man.”

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