Sunday Times 2
Tully’s tales — passage through India
View(s):It’s early in the morning when we meet in Galle. Sir Mark Tully – author, former BBC Bureau Chief in New Delhi, Chair of the jury panel of the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2016 and often hailed as India’s best-loved Englishman is in Sri Lanka for the Galle Literary Festival and to announce the winner of one of the most sought after literary prizes for South Asian voices.
Mark Tully: From theology to journalism. Pic by M.D. Nissanka
Once a theology student and an aspiring priest – after two terms he realised that he was not cut out to be a man of the cloth – Tully tumbled into journalism by accident. After giving up theology, Tully wandered into a string of unsatisfactory jobs and then joined the BBC’s personnel department. Unhappy with his job role, when a notice advertising the role was put up on the notice board, he leapt at the chance to become an Assistant Representative in Delhi purely to get out of his dreary job in the personnel department.
Born in Calcutta and having lived in India till he was nine, his maternal family had been rooted in the city for years through its colonial trade. A new job role and the tug of returning to India was an irresistible antidote to the ennui which had seeped in. When interviewed for the position, the interviewers were impressed by Tully’s connection to India and questioned him on his knowledge of Hindi. Hesitant to admit that he had little knowledge of the language and in his eagerness to land the role, Tully unthinkingly blurted out that he could recite Little Miss Muffet in Hindi. In spite of his gaffe (or perhaps because of it. We’ll never know), Tully landed the job and moved to Delhi in 1965.
A journalist working during a time far removed from today’s 24/7 cycle of breaking news and a proliferation of news sources, Sir Mark Tully is a familiar, and now beloved figure to most Indians. It was the BBC that many Indians turned to as a dependable source of news devoid of state filters and censorship. It was Sir Mark Tully’s soft spoken voice which accompanied Indians through the sharp fluctuations in the country’s political trajectory — from the Bangladesh war, Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi to the Bhopal gas disaster and the upheavals in Pakistan, Indian army’s attack on the Golden Temple and destruction of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya.
A 1992 L.A. Times profile on Tully depicted the occupational hazards that come with the job and recognition — a grim counterpoint to the gilding of the honours bestowed from both Britain and India. The article describes irate listeners who picketed his home and how the mobs which stormed Ayodhya singled Tully out by name, chanting death threats. The Emergency imposed by the Indira Gandhi government in June 1975, authorising a rule by decree and a suspension of civil liberties, was a particularly dark time. An 18-month expulsion was slapped on Tully and other foreign correspondents who refused to abide by media censorship laws imposed. While most foreign correspondents work in rotation across countries, Tully’s emphatic requests to stay in Delhi ultimately wore his superiors down and he returned after the Emergency and continued to report from India.
Also an author, Tully’s non-fiction is centred on India and is written with the cautious eye of a writer balancing divergent audiences both in India and abroad — a lingering trait from his BBC correspondent days. Too much detail would leave an Indian audience restless and too little would leave a foreign audience with no knowledge of the country, bewildered.
His description of India’s jugaad (also pronounced jugaar) in his book ‘Nonstop India’ is one that would also be instantly relatable and applicable to Sri Lanka. Jugaad is one of those colloquial words in Hindi, crammed with multiple meanings, evading the confines of English language. In the most rudimentary sense of the word, jugaad means an innovative quick-fix or shortcut or an improvised and resourceful solution using the simplest of means in the shortest amount of time. It’s a word which has in recent times, been positively appropriated and embraced by Indian management gurus as a trait of frugal innovation and resourcefulness. Sri Lankan examples of jugaad in its positive connotations, would be the enterprising gardener who uses discarded bathroom fittings and clay curd pots to grow plants in or the lottery ticket seller who uses a portable diaper drying ring to display lottery tickets.
“I love that saying about India — that anything you say about India is true and the opposite is also true,” he smiles. “And in some ways jugaar is a wonderful thing, because you do manage almost always to get to the end and the Asian Commonwealth Games were a classic example[…] There’s this positive side [of jugaar] — this wonderful ability to patch things together somehow and get through. And then there’s the negative side, of course — where actually very often if you’d done it a little bit more purposefully and efficiently, it would have been done much cheaply with less trouble and less angst”
For four years now, Tully has been working in short bursts (“I keep on getting diverted,” he grimaces) on his second attempt at fiction. “What I’ve decided is that when I get back from Colombo, I’m not going to take on anything at all until, hopefully, I finish these short stories,” he avows. The stories are set in rural India in the last days of the old socialist system when bureaucracy was at its worst. The stories, he explains, take on politics and crime, the caste system and the demise of the old railways.
Tully turned 80 in October last year and now uses a walking stick to get about. His gait is slower but he possesses a sense of humour — a prerequisite for surviving a career in journalism — erupting into a rumbling, hearty chuckle whenever something amuses him. Having resigned from the BBC in 1994, Tully lives in Delhi and has since worked as a freelance journalist and also presents the BBC Radio 4 programme ‘Something Understood’, which deals with ethical and religious discussions.
As cities do, Delhi too has mutated over time adding and shedding, almost unrecognisable from the city he arrived in. The city still has its charms for Tully and his roots to it run deep, sown partly from the seeds of necessity, fondness and fate. For Tully, Delhi’s social and cultural fabric remains vibrant — he insists that he meets far more interesting personalities in Delhi than he would in London. A stone’s throw from his house in South Delhi is the Mughal Emperor Humayun’s Tomb, where Tully goes for frequent walks, and the shrine of a famous Sufi saint, which draws crowds for its haunting strains of qawwali.
Tully has a philosophical streak and attributes the twists and turns of his life and career to quirks of fate — “Perhaps this was one of the reasons I get on all right in India — because I believe it is quite important to recognise the hand of fate or you can get quite arrogant”.