Charles Allen (1940–2020) was a British historian, writer and broadcaster best known for his books on India, the British Raj and the rediscovery of South Asia’s ancient past. Born in Kanpur, India, into a family with several generations of connections to the subcontinent, he later returned repeatedly as a traveller and researcher. Allen developed a distinctive form of popular history that combined archival research, biography, travel and accounts of explorers, soldiers, administrators and scholars. His work concentrated especially on the interaction between Britain and India and on the nineteenth-century antiquarians and archaeologists who reconstructed much of India’s early history.
His books include Plain Tales from the Raj, an oral history of British India; The Buddha and the Sahibs, about the European rediscovery of Buddhism and its monuments; Ashoka: The Search for India’s Lost Emperor, which reconstructs the recovery of the history of the Mauryan ruler Ashoka; and Kipling Sahib, a biography of Rudyard Kipling and his relationship with India. God’s Terrorists examines the nineteenth-century Wahhabi movement and conflict on the North-West Frontier, while Soldier Sahibs follows the British officers involved in the exploration and administration of that region. Allen also explored southern India in Coromandel and the origins and migrations associated with Indo-European peoples in his final book, Aryans, completed after his death with the assistance of David Loyn. His bibliography also extends beyond India to colonial Africa, Tibet and Southeast Asia, including Tales from the Dark Continent and A Mountain in Tibet.
