When Mark Tully Was Told Not to Speak Hindi - And How India Still Became His Home

Long before Sir William Mark Tully became the most trusted foreign voice in India as a BBC journalist, there was a small, almost forgettable moment in his childhood. But that moment stayed and stayed enough for Tully to make India his Home. The man with an honest, yet impactful voice became the household name in India with his BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Something Understood’. Born in Calcutta in 1935 into a British family, Tully died on January 25, 2026, at a private hospital in Delhi. He was 90.For Mark Tully, like most White children, his early world was carefully crafted – strictly English spoken at home, strict British manners, strict British rules, and even stricter British distance (from the rest). Indians were around him but not meant to be his friends

or acquaintances. As a young and curious child, he began learning to count in Hindi. It came naturally, the way languages often do to children. But it didn’t last.Tully was told gently but firmly not to speak “the language of servants.” Hindi, he learnt early, was not something he was supposed to claim.

It wasn’t cruelty. It was conditioning. It was how the British Empire worked - not through shouting, but through quiet instruction about who you were allowed to be close to, and who you were meant to remain distant from.

In his own words, Calcutta and later Darjeeling - where he was sent for schooling during the Second World War - gave Mark Tully his first memories of India - uncomplicated ones. He remembered the smells, the markets, the freedom to wander. Darjeeling stayed with him the most: open spaces, little supervision, a school that let children breathe. India came to him naturally then, without lessons or labels.That changed when his businessman father moved to Manchester. The family left, and India faded into the background. Boarding schools followed, then Cambridge, where Tully thought he would become a priest. But for Mark Tully, possibly India was destined. In 1965, almost unexpectedly, he found himself back in India. What began as a posting by the BBC in New Delhi felt more like a homecoming. Years later, Tully would say it never felt planned—just that India had a way of calling him back when it mattered most. Tully returned to the country of his birth not as a ‘ruler’ and not as a tourist, but as a listener. Soon, he was reporting across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, at a time when radio was not background noise but a way of life.Hindi – the ‘forbidden’ language in his childhood - became the language he listened to most closely. The country he was not meant to “identify” with became the country he understood better than many who claimed it by birthright.Tully travelled widely, patiently, and often slowly. He reported not just events, but atmospheres - fear during the Emergency era, resilience in rural areas of the country, contradictions in governance, faith in everyday life. His India was never exoticised or simplified. It was complex, uncomfortable, humane, and bare.When he was expelled during the Emergency in 1975 along with other foreign correspondents, he returned the moment it ended. Not out of defiance, but belonging. India, by then, was no longer a posting. It was his home.His books -- No Full Stops in India, India in Slow Motion, and later Upcountry Tales -- reflected this journey. They were not about power centres, but about people. Not about headlines, but about lives unfolding quietly in rural North India. The same India whose language he had once been told not to speak.

Perhaps that is what makes the Hindi anecdote so poignant now. Not as a symbol of exclusion - but of return.India honoured him with the Padma Bhushan in 2005. Britain knighted him in 2002. But the truest measure of Mark Tully’s legacy lay elsewhere - in the trust and heart of Indian listeners who never felt talked down to, never felt studied, never felt invisible, never felt unheard.He did not claim India loudly.He chose it, slowly and completely.Mark Tully’s voice has fallen silent. But the India he listened to so carefully continues to speak through his work. RIP, Sir