Long before the television screen or mobile phone took over our lives, there was the humble radio. For anyone who grew up in the India of the 70s, the radio was our window to a wider world. This was my universe where I fell in love with Hindi film music as Vividh Bharti played popular songs every day, where I embraced the ecstasy of India winning the 1975 hockey World Cup as Jasdev Singh’s excited voice radiated with patriotic fervour, where I would switch on my pocket transistor in class to get the latest cricket score.
And then there was BBC radio service. Every morning my late grandfather, a police officer, would listen to the daily bulletin after an hour of yoga and meditation. ‘If it is news, follow the BBC..’ he would tell me. A wide-eyed kid obsessed with the news whirl, the BBC became an early companion. As did Mr BBC for us, the one and only Mark Tully (later Sir Mark Tully).
I remember being at a hair salon in 1984 when the news first broke on BBC that Indira Gandhi had been assassinated. All India Radio was playing mournful music but it was the eloquent voice of Tully that confirmed the terrible news. Years later, in 1992, I was a reporter in Mumbai when the Babri Masjid was demolished; it was again the BBC and Tully that we turned to for the most concise on the spot reportage. Tully had been chased by a mob of frenzied kar-sevaks threatening to kill him but the harrowing experience did not stop him from telling the story as lucidly as possible.
His was the voice of trust and credibility, attributes built over time and years of painstaking travels across the length and breadth of a vast country. He was witness to cataclysmic events over several decades as the BBC’s India bureau chief and made brand BBC a household name.
I recall travelling through Uttar Pradesh with my camera person in the mid-1990s. We reached a village near Lucknow where a mango orchard owner invited us to his house for tea. He showed us an album with a photo he had taken with Tully a few years earlier. ‘It was my fan moment,’ he gushed. Tully Saab was a celebrity in an age where you didn’t have to raise your voice to make a mark. It was enough to speak in measured tones with calmness and authority.
I too had my fan moment with the great journalist. I had just moved to Delhi in 1994, finding my way through the capital’s power corridors. Frankly I was not as keen to meet politicians as I was to call on Tully. When I rang up to seek an appointment, Tully instantly responded and said that he would be delighted to meet. Where pompous editors would rarely step out of their cabins to meet their reporters, Tully was happy to engage with a twenty-something young journalist. He enjoyed being in the company of fellow journalists, sharing stories and his wide-ranging experiences with anyone who wished to listen. It was a rare quality for a person who, for all his considerable achievements, always had his feet on the ground. He was not a typical ‘firang’ journalist who sought out Indian journalists only for information; instead, he saw himself as an intrinsic part of a wider Indian journalistic community while making lifelong friendships.
Which is perhaps why he felt so much more at home in India than he did in England. The warmth and affection he felt towards India was genuine and not an Orientalist fantasy. India for Tully was the ultimate sights and sounds living experience that so enthralled him. Then be it rattling along on potholed roads in a sturdy white Ambassador or just walking in his beloved Sundar Nursery Gardens, Tully embraced India as his own.
The 1835 Macaulay’s Minute advocated for the use of English as the medium of instruction to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect”. Tully turned Macaulay on his head: he may have been English in blood and colour but had a streak of quintessential Indian curiosity and infectious energy that set him apart.
Not surprisingly, Tully was not enamoured with television. He did do the odd television documentary, including a memorable one on great Indian train journeys, but the radio was always his first love. Maybe it was the simplicity of the medium that attracted him. I once invited him to a debate on the ‘Big Fight’ programme I anchored at the time on NDTV. He did come after a fair amount of persuasion but did not really seem to enjoy the experience. ‘It’s all a bit too loud, isn’t it,’ he remarked politely.
In a sense, Tully was a product of a more genteel age, of a generation of journalists that chose news above noise, sense above sensation and credibility over chaos. To expect him to transition into this screechy new era was a bit like asking an exponent of classical music to suddenly become part of an electronic dance music band.
Indeed, what was most striking about Tully was his ability to rise above the din of political India. He was expelled from India during the Emergency but that did not stop him from analysing Indira Gandhi up close and personal. He was targeted by Hindutva forces during the Ayodhya movement but that did not prevent him from engaging in candid conversation with an L K Advani. For Tully, journalism was literally the first draft of history where the instincts of a reporter with an ear to the ground took over from all else. His commitment was to the story unfolding before his eyes, not to power or pelf.
I do recall one of our last conversations at the India International Centre where he would often be spotted with a group of close friends. ‘I guess it isn’t easy being a journalist in today’s India!’ he smiled with a twinkle in the eye. The BBC offices in India had just been searched by the income tax authorities within weeks of the broadcaster airing a documentary critical of Prime Minister Modi and the 2002 Gujarat riots. I smiled back and gently nodded. Sometimes a facial expression says more than a thousand words ever can.
(Rajdeep Sardesai is a senior
journalist and author.)
