The broadcaster and journalist Sir Mark Tully - for many years known as the BBC's voice of India - has died at the age of 90.
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.
Tully was never an armchair correspondent. He travelled relentlessly across India and neighbouring countries, by train when he could. He gave voice to the hopes and fears, trials and tribulations, of ordinary Indians as well as the country's elite. He was as comfortable wearing an Indian kurta as in a shirt and tie.
Unusually for a foreign national, Tully was accorded two of India's top civilian honours: the Padma Shri and the Padma Bhushan. Britain too gave him recognition. He was knighted for services to broadcasting and journalism in the 2002 New Year's honours list. He described the award as an honour to India.
Tully continued to write books about India - essays, analyses, short stories too, sometimes in collaboration with his partner, Gillian Wright. He lived unostentatiously in south Delhi.
Tully never gave up his British nationality but was proud also to become late in life an Overseas Citizen of India. That made him, he said, a citizen of the two countries I feel I belong to, India and Britain.
