British journalist and writer who served as the BBC's Delhi bureau chief for more than 20 years. He died on January 25th 2026, aged 90.
Born in Calcutta to English parents. His father worked as an accountant under the Raj; his mother was born in Bengal. He was schooled in Darjeeling until the age of nine, when he was sent to England. He attended Trinity Hall, Cambridge, intending to become a priest, but abandoned the vocation. He returned to India in 1965 in a junior BBC role.
As Delhi bureau chief, Tully reported on the Bhopal chemical disaster, the struggle for Bangladeshi independence, the Indian army's attack on the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar in 1984 and the assassination of Indira Gandhi that followed. At Ayodhya in 1992, when Hindu hardliners demolished an ancient mosque, his car was battered by a mob; he was dragged out and confined for hours in a tiny room, eventually escaping disguised in a shawl. His commentary went out in six languages to 50m listeners, many of them illiterate.
His beat also covered Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan, but India was where his heart lay. Hindi became fluent; he also tackled Urdu. Indira Gandhi expelled him from the country, though he returned after 18 months. The defeat of her son Rajiv Gandhi's government in 1989 was also blamed on him.
In 1994 he left the BBC after falling out spectacularly with John Birt, then director-general, whom he accused of ruling the corporation as a monolith.
Independent production companies sought him out. He presented "Something Understood", a radio series offering a collage of prose, poetry and music with a sense of the divine, for 24 years.
He argued in his books that the Western way of progress through consumerism, based on greed, did not suit India, and that in its rush to modernise the country was forgetting its own genius: culture, literature, language and tradition. The rise of Narendra Modi and Hindutva were a horror to him.
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.