Long before podcasts and push alerts, before television debates swallowed the news cycle, many Indians first encountered the world each morning through a radio voice that sounded unhurried and quietly certain. In homes, tea shops and hostel rooms, the BBC bulletin would crackle on, and somewhere in it would be Mark Tully, explaining the country back to itself.

For decades, that voice became a kind of reassurance. When rumours flew or governments obfuscated, listeners waited for Tully’s dispatch. If he had it, it was probably true.

After his death last week in Delhi at 90, the tributes that followed remembered not just a celebrated foreign correspondent, but a presence deeply rooted in India who shaped how generations understood their own history.

Tully was widely regarded as the BBC’s “voice of India” and was one of the most admired foreign correspondents of his generation. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi described Mark as “a towering voice of journalism”, adding that “his connect with India and the people of our nation was reflected in his works”.

Tully, who died on Sunday at a Delhi hospital where he was undergoing treatment, has often been described as a “chronicler of modern India”. Over several decades, he reported on many of the events that shaped South Asia’s trajectory: the birth of Bangladesh, Operation Blue Star, the demolition of the Babri mosque, periods of military rule in Pakistan, the Tamil Tigers’ rebellion in Sri Lanka and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. In 1992, while reporting on the Babri Masjid demolition, he faced threats from a mob and was locked in a room for several hours before a local official and a Hindu priest came to his aid.

But those who wrote about him this week returned less to the scale of the events and more to the texture of the man – the mentor in a kurta, the journalist with immaculate copy, the foreign correspondent who never quite behaved like one.

Writing in Federal, the BBC’s former Northeast and East India bureau chief Subir Bhaumik recalled what Tully meant to a generation of South Asian journalists trying to make their way at an international broadcaster.

“For me and many of my South Asian colleagues who made a name working for the BBC at a time when it was the ‘go-to media option’ for millions across the subcontinent, Mark was the father figure, the mentor and the teacher who made it all possible. He believed in South Asian talent, trusted our regional expertise and never imposed himself on us, unlike some of the overrated bigfoots arriving from London with the know-all swagger. At the end of the day, Mark was a deeply humble man who knew the huge complexities of the region could be handled by the BBC only if the London bigwigs trusted the field correspondents in the regions. At the same time, he taught us how to ‘market’ our stories, how to fit them into the big picture. We became global by remaining local, grounded but aware of why something here mattered for audiences elsewhere.”

Bhaumik’s first meeting with him overturned every stereotype:

“When Mark’s second-in-command in the BBC Delhi bureau, Satish Jacob, another great friend and colleague, walked me into his office-cum-residence at 1, Nizamuddin in Delhi one summer afternoon in 1986, I had expected a British burra sahib in a suit. To my surprise, I found a smiling man in a kurta-pyjama asking me in Hindi, “BBC mein kaam karenge?” Mark made an extra effort to give us the feel that the BBC was as much ours as his – and for that feeling to prevail, he would relentlessly stress the value of the language services in radio as the key to the BBC’s global outreach and acceptability.”

Others remembered the writer behind the voice.

Outlook’s Aasheesh Sharma wrote about sub-editing Tully’s copy. “As a Sub-Editor on the Edit page of a newspaper, I had read the flawless drafts of Sir Mark’s fortnightly column that mixed scholarship with lived experiences, in which all the full stops were at the right place. His insights into the politics of the Hindi heartland were as incisive as his distinct and persuasive voice on the importance of education in rural India. Subbing his columns was a pleasure early in my career.”

For many, it was during crisis that Tully mattered most.

In Frontline, S Gopalakrishnan wrote that India will likely remember Mark Tully as the broadcaster who most reliably chronicled some of the nation’s darkest moments: the Bhopal gas tragedy, Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the anti-Sikh riots in Delhi, and the demolition of the Babri Masjid. “In each instance, his reporting combined clarity, moral honesty, and a refusal to sensationalise, offering the country a steady lens through which to understand tragedy and its consequences. It will also remember that during the Emergency he was effectively forced into exile by the Indira Gandhi regime, an episode that confirmed both the price and the power of independent journalism.”

Operation Blue Star became the subject of his first book, Amritsar: Mrs Gandhi’s Last Battle, co-authored with Satish Jacob.Over the years he wrote widely, including No Full Stops in India, India in Slow Motion, Upcountry Tales, books that carried the same patient, observant tone as his broadcasts. Knighted in 2002, he also received the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan.

A BBC report noted that it was a belief shared by millions of Indians, including former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, who said he would not believe his mother, Indira, had been murdered by her Sikh bodyguards until he tuned in to his short-wave radio and heard BBC confirm it.

“As familiar to ordinary villagers as Kashmiri militants and Afghan mujahideen, he was so well known to senior ministers in Delhi that the guards of one simply allowed him to amble through the front door,” the Times wrote.

There were flashes of defiance too. As Simon O’Hagan noted in The Guardian, tensions with the BBC’s leadership led him to accuse then director-general John Birt of “turning the BBC into a secretive monolith with poor ratings and a demoralised staff”, adding that he didn’t “think Mr Birt understands what the BBC was or what it should become.” After a protracted dispute, he resigned but stayed on in Delhi.

The piece recalled that his beliefs, like his reporting, resisted certainty. “I still cling to Christianity and identify myself as Christian,” he told Radio Times in 2019. “But living in India with so many religions around me, I no longer believe that Christianity is the only way to God.”

Amit Roy, writing in Eastern Eye, remembered how Tully tried to grapple with India’s complexities rather than flatten them. On Desert Island Discs, he said:

“What I have said is we have to look to the good and the bad in the caste system,” Tully argued. “The good side of it is that it offers security, it offers companionship, a community to belong to and that sort of thing.”

When challenged, he added: “Wait a minute. There were a lot of people who were actually outside the caste system and they were treated as untouchables and that was wholly indefensible. The community is one of the good sides of the caste system and one of the reasons why I wanted to find a balanced view on caste is because so many people dismiss the whole of Indian religion, the whole of India, because of the caste system.”

Then there were the small, everyday images. Coomi Kapoor, writing in The Indian Express, described their last meeting:

“The last time I saw Mark Tully, he was sitting on a bench in the picturesque Sunder Nursery gardens, soft-spoken and warm hearted as ever, although the iconic scribe had become hard of hearing. As a resident of nearby Nizamuddin Colony in central Delhi, like me, he was a regular walker in the park, accompanied by his faithful labrador and his partner, writer Gillian Wright. But as age took its toll, I noticed with concern that of late Tully opted mostly to sit on a bench while Gillian walked the dog. It was but appropriate that Tully, who was born in India, died here at age 90.”

Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote in The Indian Express that Tully was unique in the annals of journalism “not merely because he reported from India for decades with genteel insight, understated eloquence, moral toughness, wry humour, and as much objectivity as any journalist can humanly muster. He was unique because, on so many occasions, his voice constituted the only first draft of history available at the moment.”

“Apart from Mark’s personal qualities, it is important to recall the institutional and political context that made him indispensable. The foreign press has always had an outsized importance in India, largely because our own press has been censored or constrained. The BBC, in effect, had to perform the role of a local radio station, since India had none. But the BBC was also, then, a genuinely great institution. It had its biases and blind spots, but if it commanded authority, it was because of journalists like Mark. One could occasionally disagree with a particular judgment, but remarkably, he never lost trust.”

Even in the field, he chose proximity over comfort. Former BBC correspondent Ram Dutt Tripathi told Times of India that while others checked into hotels, Tully stayed in tents, drank tea from roadside carts, ate ‘baati-chokha’ and filed stories from a makeshift media centre.

It is perhaps fitting that so many memories of him are small and ordinary: a kurta-pyjama, a park bench, a cup of tea, a voice on the radio. For many, Tully felt like someone who had stayed long enough to belong. And that is how they remembered him.

In times of misinformation, you need news you can trust. We’ve got you covered. Subscribe to Newslaundry and power our work.