Tully covered some of the defining moments in India's history in a career that spanned decades.
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For decades, the rich, warm tones of Mark Tully were familiar to BBC audiences in Britain and around the world - a much-admired foreign correspondent and respected reporter and commentator on India. He covered war, famine, riots and assassinations, the Bhopal gas tragedy and the Indian army's storming of the Sikh Golden Temple.
In the small north Indian city of Ayodhya in 1992, he faced a moment of real peril. He witnessed a huge crowd of Hindu hardliners tear down an ancient mosque. Some of the mob - suspicious of the BBC - threatened him, chanting "Death to Mark Tully". He was locked in a room for several hours before a local official and a Hindu priest came to his aid.
The demolition provoked the worst communal violence in India for many decades - it was, he said years later, the "gravest setback" to secularism since the country's independence from Britain in 1947.
India was where Tully was born - in what was then Calcutta in 1935. He was a child of the British Raj. His father was a businessman. His mother had been born in Bengal - her family had worked in India as traders and administrators for generations.
He was brought up with an English nanny who once chided him for learning to count by copying the family's driver: "that's the servants' language, not yours," he was told. He eventually became fluent in Hindi, a rare achievement in Delhi's foreign press corps and one which endeared him to many Indians for whom he was always "Tully sahib". His good cheer and evident affection for India won him the friendship and trust of many of the top rank of the country's politicians, editors and social activists.
Throughout his life, he performed a balancing act: English, without doubt; but not - he insisted - an expat who was passing through India. He had roots there; it was his home. It's where he lived for three-quarters of his l
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