On a road trip deep in the interior of India Rajiv Gandhi said he would not believe his mother, Indira, had been murdered until he tuned in to his short-wave radio and heard Mark Tully confirm it.
The veteran BBC journalist and broadcaster, who was known as the “voice of India”, always said it was more important to him to live in India than to work for the BBC. Happily the two coincided. With his quintessentially plummy English, cultivated as a boy in Raj-era Calcutta, he was the distinctive voice of the BBC from the subcontinent for more than five decades.
Sir Mark Tully, journalist, was born on October 24, 1935. He died on January 25, 2026, aged 90