The Tully Standard

The passing of Mark Tully at the age of 90 marks the end of a journalistic life that was unusually long, unusually intimate, and increasingly rare.

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For more than four decades, India was not merely his professional assignment but the central moral landscape of his work. Few foreign correspondents stayed as long, travelled as widely, or listened as patiently to a country that resists easy explanation.

Born in pre-Independence Calcutta in 1935, Tully's earliest memories were formed in an India still under colonial rule. Yet the India he came to understand and write about ~ was decisively post-colonial. When he returned as a young correspondent in the 1960s, he arrived not as a passing observer but as someone willing to remain. Over time, he would spend nearly half his life in the country, reporting from villages, small towns, conflict zones and corridors of power with equal seriousness.