DR LUIS DIAS
All too often one learns something new about a person only after their demise. Like most of you, I knew Mark Tully (1935-2026) as the BBC’s India correspondent, eventually its bureau chief in New Delhi. I heard him on the radio, watched him on television and read his forthright articles and press interviews. I haven’t yet read his books, but they are on an ever-lengthening bucket list.
I only learned a few days ago through the many obituaries after his passing that Tully studied Theology at Trinity Hall Cambridge and that he intended to become a priest in the Church of England but abandoned this ambition after two terms at Lincoln Theological College.
I also learned for the first time about ‘Something Understood’, a weekly radio programme (broadcast early on Sunday mornings with a repeat late on Sunday evening) hosted by Tully on BBC Radio 4 which ran from 1995 to 2024, dealing with topics of religion, spirituality and “the larger question of human life,” exploring it through speech, music, prose, and poetry.
The title of the programme itself is derived from poetry: it is a quotation from a 1633 poem ‘Prayer’ by George Herbert (1593-1633), English poet, orator and priest of the Church of England. Herbert’s poetry influenced his peers as well as poets in later centuries from Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, and W.H. Auden. He is venerated as a saint in the Anglican and Lutheran churches, with feast days on February 27 and March 1(the day of his death) respectively.
Considered a centerpiece of Herbert’s religious poetry, ‘Prayer’ showcases his metaphysical style and his Anglican faith. The 14-line sonnet looks at prayer in terms of metaphors: “the church’s banquet,”“angel’s age,” “God’s breath in man returning to his birth,” “The soul in paraphrase,”“heart in pilgrimage,” “Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,” “The six-days world transposing in an hour,” “A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear,” etc. The last line contains the radio programme title and seems apt for us in India too: “The land of spices; something understood.”
Yet prayer, faith, and anything to do with religion in general in India is “something misunderstood,” more often than not deliberately, with malicious intent, for political gain.
I learned about the ‘Something Understood’ radio programme from an obituary the day after Tully’s demise in The Guardian by Simon O’Hagan. O’Hagan had interviewed Tully for Radio Times in 2019, in which Tully said, “I still cling to Christianity and identify myself as Christian. But living in India with so many religions around me, I no longer believe that Christianity is the only way to God.” It aligns with my own belief system; Christianity is “my way” to God, but I have a healthy respect for all the other ways.
A day later, O’Hagan wrote a piece ‘The spiritual journey of Mark Tully’ on his own ‘Spectred Dial’ website, in which he reminisced about that 2019 Radio Times interview.
“The occasion was a sombre one,” he recalled. “Tully’s Radio 4 programme ‘Something Understood’ — his meditation on matters spiritual — was being recorded for the final time after 24 years, and it’s fair to say that he was dismayed at the decision to bring new editions to an end and instead start running repeats (which in due course themselves ceased).”
“I feel sad for myself,” Tully told O’Hagan. “I feel sad for everyone behind the programme, and I feel sad because I know a lot of listeners like it.”
On a brief return visit to the U.K., Tully had an encounter after an Edinburgh church service that he related to O’Hagan.
“A fellow member of the congregation had come up to Tully to tell him that this was the first church service she had been able to attend since the death of her husband, and that the decision she’d made to be there was all down to that morning’s edition of ‘Something Understood’. She’d listened, and suddenly things changed for her,” O’Hagan wrote. That meant a lot to Tully.
“If one ever needed a story to exemplify the power of radio, then you probably couldn’t do better than this one,” said O’Hagan.
I tried to listen to past episodes of ‘Something Understood’ from the Radio 4 archive but was stonewalled for being outside the U.K.
Tully’s last ‘live’ programme was on Easter Sunday 2019. He took as his theme for the day a line from T.S. Eliot’s set of four Quartets’: “In my end is my beginning.” It is the last line of ‘East Coker’, the second of those poems.
East Coker is a village and civil parish in Somerset that held a particular importance to Eliot and family because their ancestor, Andrew Eliot, left the village to travel to America in 1669. Eliot’s ashes lie in its parish church.
Completed in wartime (February 1940), ‘East Coker’ has been described as “a poem of late summer, earth, and faith.” It is in five sections, each holding a theme that is common to each of the poems in the set: time, experience, purgation, prayer, and wholeness.
The poem begins with the last line turned on its head: “In my beginning is my end.” Poetry can be read, but to really come alive, it has to be said out loud, even if in one’s own head. For those interested, there is an excellent reading of ‘East Coker’ by Ralph Fiennes that I followed with
the text.
Several portions of the poem really ‘spoke’ to me. For instance, in the second section, he seems to argue that those who pursue only reason and science are ignorant. Even our progress is not progress as we continue to repeat the same errors as the past. “Had they deceived us, Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders, Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?”
“Do not let me hear, Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly, Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession, Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.”
And now (for me) comes the punchline: “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”
Eliot was waxing metaphorical in the last line of this section, but it is literally true of our world at a time of climate change: “The houses are all gone under the sea”, and true of our hill cutting-happy Goa: “The dancers are all gone under the hill.”
The third section is “dark” in every sense of the word, not just its repeated usage. It bemoans fact that those who wield power and rule over us “all go into the dark.”
“And we all go with them, into the silent funeral, Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.”
It resonated with something that Tully told O’Hagan at the 2019 interview, even more relevant today: “The world is going through a very tumultuous, dangerous period. We’re getting leaders who are very certain they have the answer — who forget that the world is made up of a very few privileged people and very many people who are under-privileged.”
