Essayists From England

"I am very proud not just of my connection with Calcutta but my connection with India which is approaching 50 years now. I do not like being called an expat. That's why I do hope to become an Overseas Citizen of India. That will mean I will be acknowledged as a citizen of the two countries I feel I belong to, India and Britain. I will bring together the two nationalities which were separated during my childhood."

"Mark Tully's private life is complicated. In Delhi, he stays with his girlfriend, Gillian Wright, while in London he stays with his wife, and mother of his four children, Margaret. He has presented a BBC television series, "The Lives of Jesus", using India, as well as the Holy Land, to explain the mysteries of Christ's divinity."

"It struck me that a sense of uncertainty about ways of reaching God is what makes Hinduism different. Because of its ability to adapt, so many faiths could thrive here."

"Though I was born in India (Kolkata), I was taught how not to become an Indian."

"Hinduism can survive modern times if only the people learn to bend with the wind. People will have to find a balance between the new and the old."

"My connection with Calcutta stretches back a long way. It goes back at least to 1857, the year of what my maternal great-grandfather would have called the Indian Mutiny. He managed to escape the uprising in eastern Uttar Pradesh in a boat down the Ganges to Calcutta. My maternal grandfather made his living selling jute in the city. He bought the jute in what is now Bangladesh, which is how my mother happened to be born there. But she met and married my father in Calcutta. He was the first of his family to come to India where he became one of the senior partners of Gillanders Arbuthnot, a Calcutta-based firm."

"It is not too difficult to find people in that country [Ireland] crying over what they have lost."

"Few foreigners manage to get under the skin of the world's biggest democracy the way he does, and fewer still can write about it with the clarity and insight he brings to all his work."

"There is blind secularism in this country [India]. If anyone speaks about Hinduism in this country, they are branded as Hindu fundamentalists."

"There are many arguments about the role of religion in the history of this country. But the fundamental fact still remains that India has been a historic home to all the great religions of the world. I believe this pluralism and this ability to have an individual element in your religion is culturally specific to India...I came to India as an orthodox Christian thinking there was only one way to God. I now believe there are many ways to God and that came from living in India."

"I am amazed that Roli Books should publish such thinly disguised plagiarism, and allow the author to hide in a cavalier manner behind a nom-de-plume. The book is clearly modelled on my career, even down to the name of the main character. That character's journalism is abysmal, and his views on Hindutva and Hinduism do not in any way reflect mine. I would disagree with them profoundly."

"I had rather thought I was yesterday's man."

"There is hope: in a fiercely independent Supreme court, a crusading free press and an absolute commitment to representative democracy. It's time to slip those last reins of rundown colonial institutions."

"It was the promotion of the ancient Indian tradition of religious tolerance, a tolerance which owes so much to Hinduism's own pluralism. .. This tradition provides a basis for Hindus and for Indians who believe in many of the many other religions of this country to live with self-respect, in peace, and proud of their national identity. This is very much an Indian tradition, a tradition, which is very different too from the tradition of countries where Semitic religions like Christianity and Islam have dominated. It is the tradition which could meet the needs of so many other countries in the world."

"Whenever I go and give a talk on Hinduism, and when I say something nice about it, invariably someone from the audience will object: "I think Hinduism is a disgusting religion because of the caste system.""

"England struck me as a very miserable place, dark and drab, without the bright skies of India."

"I just knew I could not trust my sexuality to behave as a Christian priest should, And I didn't want to be a cause of scandal."

"I remember, too, the kudos being born in Calcutta gave me by making me stand-out as a rarity when, at the age of 10, I found myself in the highly competitive society of a British boarding school. To boost my kudos even further, I would boast that I was born in the "Second City of the British Empire"."

"I hate to lose my connection with the great city of Calcutta."

"Mark Tully is well-known as a thoroughly decent gentleman and one of the finest journalists ever posted to India. This is a badly-written book which should never have passed a lawyer or a publisher. It totally misrepresents his personal life and his work."

"I am very proud to have worked with the BBC for 30 years. I had hoped to continue to work for the corporation but that is no longer possible."

"Since I expressed my views...in July last year, I have sought to negotiate a position which would allow me to defend my stance in public, especially when it is questioned. The BBC has required that I do not speak on matters on which my stance is already known. That is not acceptable to me. I have therefore asked the corporation to accept my resignation as South Asia correspondent."

"During the nine years that Calcutta was my home, I lived a life which would now be seen as thoroughly politically incorrect. From our youngest days, we were never allowed to forget that we were different - we were English, not Indian. We had an English nanny who saw to that. She supervised us 24x7 and once, finding me learning to count from our driver, she cuffed my head, saying "that's the servants' language, not yours". Inevitably, we were not allowed to play with Indian children. There were even class barriers to the European children we were allowed to play with. My nanny would not allow us to play with children who only had Indian or Anglo-Indian nannies because their parents couldn't afford a "proper nanny", as she saw herself. European society in the Calcutta of those days was divided by a strict class system, not dissimilar to the caste system. Members of the ICS, were considered the Brahmins (the elite caste), while the members of the Indian army were regarded as the Rajputs (the warrior caste). As a businessman, my father was a Vaisya (trading caste), dismissed by the snooty ICS and army as a mere "boxwallah"."

"Mark Tully may also have wanted to atone for his coverage of South Asia. I remember when we were both reporting on the Valley of Kashmir in the early nineties, that he would always highlight human right abuses on Muslims by the army, but hardly ever spoke about the 400.000 Kashmiri Hindus who were chased out of their ancestral homeland by threats, violence, rapes, torture and murder – and today have become refugees in their own countries... Many of us know that since the mid-eighties Pakistan encouraged, financed, trained and armed Kashmiri separatism. But Mark always made it a point to say: "India accuses Pakistan to foster separatism in Kashmir"; or :"elections are being held in Indian- held Kashmir"; or "Kashmir militants" have attacked an army post, instead of "terrorists"."

" My day-mind can endure Upright, in hope, all it must undergo.  But O, afraid, unsure, My night-mind waking lies too low, too low."

"Slight as thou art, thou art enough to hide, Like all created things, secrets from me, And stand a barrier to eternity."

"Round the blue sea I love the best  The argent foam played, slender, fleet; I saw—past Wordsworth and the rest—  Her natural, Greek, and silver feet."

"O daisy mine, what will it be to look From God's side even of such a simple thing?"

"Rome in the ages, dimmed with all her towers, Floats in the midst, a little cloud at tether."

"This moment's Tiber with his shining eyes  Never saw Rome before."

"My heart shall be thy garden. Come, my own,  Into thy garden; thine be happy hours Among my fairest thoughts, my tallest flowers,  From root to crowning petal thine alone."

"[N]o mirror keeps its glances."

"Rich meanings of the prophet-Spring adorn, Unseen, this colourless sky of folded showers, And folded winds; no blossom in the bowers; A poet's face asleep in this grey morn. Now in the midst of the old world forlorn A mystic child is set in these still hours. I keep this time, even before the flowers, Sacred to all the young and the unborn."

"If life is not always poetical, it is at least metrical. Periodicity rules over the mental experience of man, according to the path of the orbit of his thoughts. Distances are not gauged, ellipses not measured, velocities not ascertained, times not known. Nevertheless, the recurrence is sure. What the mind suffered last week, or last year, it does not suffer now; but it will suffer again next week or next year. Happiness is not a matter of events; it depends upon the tides of the mind."

"For you knew not it was I, And I knew not it was you. We have learnt, as days went by. But a flower struck root and grew Underground, and no one knew."

"Compassion in the highest degree is the divinest form of religion."

"O Spring, I know thee! Seek for sweet surprise  In the young children's eyes. But I have learnt the years, and know the yet  Leaf-folded violet."

"In the case of the woman's figure it is the foot, with its extreme proportional smallness, that gives the precious instability, the spring and balance that are so organic."

"It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress of man is so much to be desired.[…] The leg is the best part of the figure,[…] and the best leg is the man's.[…] But man should no longer disguise the long lines, the strong forms in those lengths of piping or tubing that are of all garments the most stupid."

"Hamlet, being a little mad, feigned madness. It is when I am angry that I pretend to be angry, so as to present the truth in an obvious and intelligible form."

"Thou art like silence unperplexed,  A secret and a mystery Between one footfall and the next."

"Now, in our opinion, no author should be blamed for obscurity; nor should any pains be grudged in the effort to understand him, provided that he has done his best to be intelligible. Difficult thoughts are quite distinct from difficult words. Difficulty of thought is the very heart of poetry."

"There is nothing in the world more peaceful than apple-leaves with an early moon."

"The majority can tell ordinary truth, but they should not trust themselves for truth extraordinary."

"[S]ome things must needs gain in mystery before we can at all undertake to think upon them. Without mystery they are all obscure. Who can think, for instance, of the infinity of space without adding inconceivable things to his meditation?"

"Life, light, and distance—in poetry—seem to leave on the mind's eye the impression of red, yellow, and blue, radiant less or more according as the life is less or more impassioned, the light celestial, and the space remote."

"The quality of poetry is not strained. It has not to abide our repeated questions. It tests and is not tested. Every true lover of poetry knows that when he cites great lines it is not the poetry but the hearer that is to be judged."

"[S]he used her intellect, and that action is the vitality of all poetry that is not song only, but poetry and song."

"Men in cities look upward not much more than animals, and these—except the dog when he bays the moon—look skyward not at all."

"I wish it were not customary to write of one art in the terms of another, and I use the words "music" and "musical" under protest, because the world has been so delighted to call any verse pleasant to the ear "musical," that it has not supplied us with another and more specialised and appropriate word."