The Lutyens blind spot: Mark Tully saw the English media’s disconnect with ordinary Indians

In 1991, Mark Tully, by then the face of the BBC in India and one of the most recognisable foreign broadcasters covering the country, turned a critical gaze towards the English-language news media in India.

A clear instance of this was when he began questioning the blinkered way in which the English-language media in India covered the Kumbh Mela of 1989.

In No Full Stops in India (Penguin Viking, 1991), Tully drew attention to a widening gap between English journalism and the everyday cultural practices of ordinary Indians:

“No other country in the world could provide a spectacle like the Kumbh Mela. It was a triumph for the much-maligned Indian administrators, but it was a greater triumph for the people of India. And how did the English-language press react to this triumph? Inevitably, with scorn. The Times of India, the country’s most influential paper, published a long article replete with phrases like ‘Obscurantism ruled the roost in Kumbh’, ‘Religious dogma overwhelmed reason at the Kumbh’, and ‘The Kumbh after all remained a mere spectacle with its million hues but little substance.’ 

The Times of India criticised VHP’s politics, but made no attempt to analyse or even to describe the piety of the millions who bathed at the Sangam,” Tully wrote.

Tully’s observation also points to a larger question – one that would come to define India’s public life in the decades that followed, and is even more talked about these days. His commentary on the Kumbh was not just about media coverage. It was an early sign of a deeper disconnect taking shape between English-speaking elites and everyday India, and of a political space that was beginning to open up around religion and identity.

Did this cultural distance leave the English-language media ill-prepared for the rapid rise of Hindu nationalist politics in the 1990s? Was the swelling support for the political right missed, or at least insufficiently understood, because belief systems and ways of living were rarely engaged on their own terms – as lived realities shaping social behaviour rather than as spectacle or mobilisation? Three decades on, the BJP's political ascent to the power centres of the country is often described, whether critically or approvingly, as drawing its energy from Hindu nationalism.

Tully’s journalistic intuition would, a decade later, receive academic attention in the work of media scholar Professor Arvind Rajagopal, of New York University, in Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (Cambridge University Press, 2001): 

“If the English media treated issues of religion as peripheral to their concerns, and the Hindi media treated it as a relatively familiar, living presence and as a sociological fact, the latter could become an organising ground for the Hindu right,” Rajagopal observed.

Almost a decade and a half later, sociologist Shiv Visvanathan echoed a related point from a social perspective when he observed that “a generation felt that elite modernisation was a hypocritical affair conducted by groups which used words like ‘secular’ to dismiss the thought processes of a middle class more rooted in religion.”

Returning to Mark Tully, these analyses reinforce what he had already begun to sense through his journalism. His critique of the English-speaking elite’s cultural cocoon was not confined to that Kumbh coverage alone. It was part of a longer engagement with how belief, identity and everyday life were being sidelined in public discourse. Even after being chased by a mob during the Babri Masjid demolition and rescued by a mahant (priest) and a Hindi journalist, Tully resisted collapsing Hinduism into its militant political expressions.

Tully’s writings were carefully studied by literary scholar Nivedita Misra, of the University of the West Indies. She examined his evolving ways of engaging with India and Hinduism. Misra’s reading of Tully also helps place his lifelong discomfort with English-speaking elite frameworks in a wider context. From No Full Stops in India through India in Slow Motion and India’s Unending Journey, Tully repeatedly questioned how development professionals, NGOs, bureaucrats and sections of India’s intelligentsia approached the country through abstract models and imported rationalist frameworks, often remaining distant from lived experience. For Tully, this was not merely a political problem but a cultural one: English-educated elites, he felt, were increasingly uncomfortable with uncertainty, belief and ambiguity – traits embedded in everyday Indian life.

At the same time, in his reflections, Tully drew a clear distinction between Hinduism as a philosophical and civilisational tradition and Hindutva as a political project. He rejected militant Hindu nationalism and communal mobilisation, even as he became deeply engaged with Hindu thought. Over time, his writing reflects a growing interest in Hinduism’s pluralism, its openness to doubt, and concepts such as karma. He viewed them as offering ways of living with uncertainty that contrasted with what he regarded as the doctrinal rigidity of Western Christianity, even as he continued to identify as Christian.

In her paper, Misra also makes the point that Tully came to interpret the rise of Hindutva largely as a sociological response – shaped by minority politics, elite secular alienation and elite missionary politics – rather than as an expression of Hindu spirituality itself. One may also argue that his generally sympathetic view of the Hindu way of life led him to downplay critiques of some prevailing traditions and to avoid sharp judgments on questions of alleged violence and vandalism. Essentially a fair observer, he condemned acts of communal violence, and tried to delink the reservoirs of people’s pursuit of faith and spirituality from the narrow interests of those behind communal killings and vandalism.

Together, these strands reveal a journalist whose early media critique gradually widened into a more personal engagement with belief and culture. In the process, he was rejecting political extremism while remaining drawn to Hindu philosophy, and continuing to challenge the elite's distance from ordinary India. In later phases, as he moved from broadcasting to writing, he engaged more with such themes, and his repertoire became more reflective. 

A bit more than many Indian journalists working in English media, Mark Tully tried not to come across as an amateur Indian. In doing so, he was convinced that he should pull away from the elite frames of English media offices in India – frames that escaped everyday India, frames that looked down on the thought process of the average Indian. After covering some historic events in South Asia as a broadcaster, his forays were more into uncovering the ancient and multiple layers of continuity and change in Indian thought. 

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