Mark Tully

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 15 June 2003

⏱️ 36 minutes

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the veteran broadcaster Mark Tully. Born in Calcutta and with ancestors who were involved in the Indian Mutiny, he has a love of India in his bones and has made his career reporting it. Indeed, in his 30 years as BBC India correspondent his name and the role became synonymous - he has been called a cult figure and his reports were broadcast in English, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Nepali and Bengali to as many as 50 million people on the sub-continent.

As a young man he considered entering the clergy but he left theology college to begin his career at the BBC. Shortly thereafter he returned to India after an absence of more than a decade and felt like he had come home. He's been there ever since. He has mapped the great events on the sub-continent since the 1960s, including Bangladesh's war of independence, the upheavals in Pakistan, the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Union Carbide disaster at Bhopal, the Indian army attack on the Golden Temple at Amritsa and the assassinations of both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. He has heard a crowd chanting 'death to Tully' as well as being expelled from the country, captured, threatened, imprisoned and even accused of bringing down the government. For his pains he has been awarded the OBE and the Tadma Shre, an Indian honour rarely bestowed on foreigners. These days he spends a couple of months a year in Britain seeing friends and family and recording some of his Radio 4 programmes Something Understood.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a broadcaster. Born in Calcutta 67 years ago, he was brought up in
0:29.0	strict colonial style before being packed off to public school in England and to Cambridge University.
0:34.9	He thought about becoming a priest but abandoned the idea when he was told that he seemed more
0:38.9	at home in the pub than in the pulpit.
0:41.5	Then having recited Little Miss Moffitt in Hindi to a BBC appointments board, he found
0:46.1	himself back in the land of his birth, eventually as head of the BBC's Bureau there.
0:51.6	His became the voice of India, one which understood its vast
0:54.5	complications and reported with compassion and accuracy on the assassinations
0:59.2	of both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, the Bopalaster, and the storming of the Golden Temple of Amritsa.
1:06.0	Eventually, after nearly 30 years in the job, he fell out with the BBC, or rather with its
1:11.0	director general John Bert, and resigned his stewardship of Indian affairs.
1:15.0	But he continues to write books about the country he loves and his voice can now be heard back on the BBC presenting the Sunday morning radio program something
1:23.8	understood. India he says has made me in a funny way I belong to it. He is Mark
1:30.4	Tully and indeed nine years after you resigned from the BBC, Mark, you're still there.
1:35.6	I mean, you're never going to leave it, are you?
1:37.6	Well, I never like to say never, Sue, because I have this sort of, I'm a bit superst superstitious and I feel if you say never then the next
1:45.6	thing which happens is for some reason or other you have to leave but I I feel
1:49.6	absolutely at home there and I have no plans to leave I think would be very good.
1:53.6	How Indian is your life there in terms of your everyday affairs in terms of what you eat or
1:59.7	how you dress or how you live?
	...

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