"Thanks to India, I started believing in destiny and fate." Mark Tully

Tully sahib has become the only knight in town-if you exclude Her Majesty's High Commissioner. Welcome Sir Mark. But don't give all the credit to the British Crown. It is Mother India's moment as well. For, Tully sahib's knighthood is, in many ways, the Empire Salutes Back. This Englishman turned native long ago, though you don't hear his familiar voice any longer on the crackling shortwaves of the BBC World Service.

Rather, he has become an endearing monument of the Raj in Delhi, writing and talking like an Indian, powered by disillusion, excitement and enquiry. So when a subdued Tully-he is still mourning the death of his pet Labrador-receives your congratulations at his house in Nizamuddin East, Delhi, he, with his partner Gillian Wright, a writer, is in the middle of finishing the introduction to his new book, the working title of which is India in Slow Motion. It is about "this amazing ramshackle administration, this babu raj" in India.

"I was amazed. I thought I was yesterday's man. I had no ambition to be a knight. I didn't think it was possible." He was thrilled by the Indian reaction. "It is an honour for India too." His adopted country had, after all, honoured him with a Padma Shri nine years ago.

Mark Tully reporting from India for BBC radio for 22 years was the definitive voice on the subcontinent, its politics and culture, its ruptures and rancour, its disasters and despair, ranging from the fire on the border to the poverty in Calcutta. He was a true hero in the romance of the radio. Seven years ago, he said no, he, the traditionalist, saw tyranny in the new market-driven Bush House of Sir John Birt. He detected "the supreme irony that the World Service, praised by democrats and those who struggle for freedom, while attacked by dictators and torturers, is now to be dismantled by those charged with protecting it".

The Beeb lost a stalwart. India did not. Tully is still the correspondent of India, and India is more than a dateline, it is home, it is knowledge, it is karmic destination. "Thanks to India, I started looking at life differently. One of the things which I am most aware of is the element of fate-destiny. I was destined to be here." Son of a boxwallah who lived in India as a wealthy chartered accountant from 1922 to 1947, Tully was born 66 years ago in Calcutta, and stayed there till he was 10. "I'm a son of the Raj." Back in England, it was Marlborough Public School and Cambridge, reportedly an unhappy place where his best friends were women and alcohol.

Post-Cambridge, the sinner thought priesthood in the Church of England would be salvation, but he failed to come out of the Lincoln Theological College as a servant of God, for demons were still active within. What then? "My father thought I would not be good in business, and he was right." Then, in 1964, destiny intervened, Mark Tully reached Delhi as BBC's India correspondent. There were no full stops in his radio dispatches-only a semicolon when he was thrown out during the Emergency-from the country that would become home.

India also helped reclaim a spiritual experience. One of the BBC television series he recently presented was The Lives of Jesus. His Sunday Radio 4 programme is called "Something Understood". He takes religion seriously and for what it actually is-an expression of faith, even a spectacle. For this he was lampooned by Indian modernists as "Ram's Englishman" during the Ayodhya years.

Not that he has shed all his Englishness. He may boast with a touch of inverse snobbery that he gets his suits tailored in Delhi's Khan Market but he still maintains his membership of the Oriental Club in London. In Nizamuddin or Swiss Cottage, he personifies the enduring romance of the Indo-British encounter.

Ah, the amazing spirit of the new knight, and the happiest is his companion Gillian Wright: "When I was a teenager, the story of King Arthur was my fascination. Today I live with the knight." The new Camelot is far, far away from Exeter, all because of Tully sahib, sorry, Sir Mark.