Charles Allen, in the center, aged three in India. He was of the sixth generation of his family to be born in the country and first came to the United Kingdom aged eight.
Charles Allen, in the center, aged three in India. He was of the sixth generation of his family to be born in the country and first came to the United Kingdom aged eight.
Plain Tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the Twentieth Century
(The Raj was, for two hundred years, the jewel in the Brit...)
The Raj was, for two hundred years, the jewel in the British imperial crown. Although founded on military expansionism and undoubted exploitation, it developed over the centuries into what has been called 'benign autocracy' - the government of many by few, with the active collaboration of most Indians in recognition of a desire for the advancement of their country. Charles Allen's classic oral history of the period that marked the end of British rule was first published a generation ago. Now reissued as the imperial century closes, this brilliantly insightful and bestselling collection of reminiscences illustrates the unique experience of British India: the sadness and luxury for some; the joy and deprivation for others.
A Mountain In Tibet: The Search for Mount Kailas and the Sources of the Great Rivers of Asia
(Throughout the East, there runs a legend of a great mount...)
Throughout the East, there runs a legend of a great mountain at the center of the world, where four rivers have their source. Charles Allen traces this legend to Western Tibet where there stands Kailas, worshipped by Hindus and Buddhists alike as the home of their gods and the navel of the world. Close by are the sources of four mighty rivers: the sacred Ganges, the Indus, the Sutlej, and the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra. For centuries Kailas remained an enigma to the outside world. Then a succession of remarkable men took up the challenge of penetrating the hostile, frozen wastelands beyond the Western Himalayas, culminating in the great age of discovery, the final years of the Victorian era. A Mountain in Tibet is an extraordinary story of exploration and high adventure, full of the excitement and color expected from the author of Plain Tales from the Raj.
Tales from the South China Seas: Images of the British in South East Asia in the Twentieth Century
(This work chronicles the adventures of the last generatio...)
This work chronicles the adventures of the last generation of British men and women who went East to seek their fortunes. Drawn into the colonial territories scattered around the South China Sea, they found themselves in an exotic, intoxicating world. It was a land of rickshaws and shanghai jars, sampans, and Straits Steamers, set against a background of palm-fringed beaches and tropical rain-forests. But it was also a world of conflicting beliefs and many races, where the overlapping of widely differing moral standards and viewpoints created a heady and dangerous atmosphere.
The Savage Wars Of Peace: Soldiers' Voices, 1945-89
(Since the Second World War, the British Army has been eng...)
Since the Second World War, the British Army has been engaged in armed conflicts around the globe every year except 1968. Some have been full-scale military campaigns, but most have been undeclared wars, fought out in such widely differing theatres as Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Brunei, Borneo, Aden, Oman, and Northern Ireland. The Savage Wars of Peace is the fighting soldiers' view of these campaigns, recounted in their own words to oral historian Charles Allen, chronicler of such classics as Plain Tales from the Raj and Tales from the South China Seas. Drawing on the spoken recollections of over seventy military figures of all ranks, Charles Allen has assembled a rich kaleidoscope of images of warfare as experienced by those at the sharp end. Letting the soldiers speak for themselves, with extraordinary and sometimes very moving candor, these unique first-hand accounts give a rare insight into Britain's modern 'peacetime' army - the changes it has undergone since 1945, and the bonds that unite fighting men.
Soldier Sahibs: The Men Who Made the North-west Frontier
(Soldier Sahibs is the astonishing story of a brotherhood ...)
Soldier Sahibs is the astonishing story of a brotherhood of young men who together laid claim to the most notorious frontier in the world, the North-West Frontier, which today forms the volatile boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Known collectively as 'Henry Lawrence's young men', each had distinguished himself in the East India Company's wars in Punjab before going on to make his name as a 'political' on the Frontier - Herbert Edwardes, who 'pacified' Bannu; John Nicholson, a forebear of the author who became the terror of the Sikhs as 'Nikkal Seyn'; 'Uncle' James Abbot of Hazara, and many others. Drawing extensively on their journals, diaries, and letters, as well as his own recent travels in their footsteps, Charles Allen, acknowledged master story-teller of imperial history, weaves the individual stories of these soldier sahibs into an extraordinary tale that climaxes on Delhi Ridge in 1857 when the brotherhood came together to 'save' India.
(In December 1903 a British army marched over the Himalaya...)
In December 1903 a British army marched over the Himalayas to counter a non-existent Russian threat and was confronted by a medieval Tibetan army ordered to stop it by non-violent means. It was a clash between the mightiest political power in the world and the weakest. Leading the mission was the charismatic Francis Younghusband. Commanding the army escort was an officer determined to do things by the book: General James Macdonald. The result was a conflict at every level. Drawing on diaries, letters, and unpublished first-hand accounts, Charles Allen reveals not only the true character of one of Britain's great imperial heroes but also the calamitous outcome for the Tibetan people of Britain's last attempt at empire-building.
(Maharajas: Resonance from the Past is the story of the Ma...)
Maharajas: Resonance from the Past is the story of the Maharajas, Nizams, Nawabs, Maharawals, Jams, Rajas, and Raos - rulers of the 565 Princely States of India. It tells of their origins from Vedic times, their rise to power, the proud defense of their clans, royal tastes which found expression in the magnificent architecture of their palaces and forts, mind-boggling collections of jewelry and arms and armor, lavish performance of rites and ceremonies. It tells of the romance of desert kingdoms, the crushing blow of the Mughals and the British Raj; the phoenix-like rise of new States, and their eventual decline. Illustrated with almost 200 photographs from museums and previously unseen images from the personal collections of Royal descendants, this is a fascinating celebration of the splendor of Princely India.
God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad
(What are the roots of today's militant fundamentalism in ...)
What are the roots of today's militant fundamentalism in the Muslim world? In this insightful and wide-ranging history, Charles Allen finds an answer in an eighteenth-century reform movement of Muhammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab and his followers-the Wahhabi-who sought the restoration of Islamic purity and declared violent jihad on all who opposed them. The Wahhabi teaching spread rapidly-first throughout the Arabian Peninsula, then to the Indian subcontinent, where a more militant expression of Wahhabism flourished. The ranks of today's Taliban and al-Qaeda are filled with young men trained in Wahhabi theology. God's Terrorists sheds much-needed light on the origins of modern terrorism and shows how this dangerous ideology lives on today.
(The first biography of Kipling's younger years: his India...)
The first biography of Kipling's younger years: his Indian childhood, abandonment in England, and coming of age as a writer. Rudyard Kipling was born in Bombay in 1865 and spent his early years there, before being sent to England at the age of six, where he was desperately unhappy. Charles Allen's great-grandfather brought the sixteen-year-old Kipling back to India to work on The Civil and Military Gazette, and thus began young Rudyard's literary career. He arrived in Bombay on October 18, 1882 - "a prince entering his kingdom" - and for the next seven years, his writing established him as a popular and critical, though sometimes controversial, success. Allen has written a brilliant account of these formative years - as a child in India, his unhappy years in England, and his coming of age back "home" in Bombay. In this tale of family and Empire, Allen traces the Indian experiences of Kipling's parents, Lockwood and Alice, and reveals what kind of culture the young writer was born into and how it would shape his life and writing over the next twenty years.
The Buddha and Dr Fuhrer: An Archaeological Scandal
(This true account of the scandal that enveloped the disco...)
This true account of the scandal that enveloped the discovery in 1898 of an inscribed casket said to contain the ashes of the Buddha, is set against the background of the high noon of the British Raj. In January 1898 a British landowner, William Claxton Peppé, excavated a large Buddhist brick stupa on his estate close to India’s border with Nepal. At a depth of 24 feet, he uncovered a huge stone coffer. What made this discovery so important was an inscription found on the top of one of the reliquary caskets - declaring it to contain ashes of the Buddha. This news aroused world-wide interest since no other so well authenticated relics of the Buddha had ever been found. But almost immediately it became known that a German archaeologist, Dr. Anton Führer, working nearby at the same time had not only made bogus claims and faked his results but had also been associated with the dig. Führer was quickly unmasked by a British magistrate who himself had a stake in the excavation.
(Indias lost emperor Ashoka Maurya has a special place in ...)
Indias lost emperor Ashoka Maurya has a special place in history in his quest to govern India by moral force alone he turned Buddhism from a minor sect into a world religion and set up a new yardstick for the government but Ashoka's bold experiment ended in tragedy and he was forgotten for almost two thousand years in this beautifully written, multi-layered journey Charles Allen describes how fragments of the Ashokan story were gradually discovered, pieced together by a variety of British orientalists: antiquarians, archaeologists and epigraphists in doing so, they did much to recover India's ancient history itself the lost emperor tells the story of the man who was arguably the greatest ruler India has ever known.
The Prisoner of Kathmandu: Brian Hodgson in Nepal 1820-43
(The Prisoner of Kathmandu is the story of Brian Hodgson, ...)
The Prisoner of Kathmandu is the story of Brian Hodgson, Britain’s "father of Himalayan studies." Born in 1801, Hodgson joined the Bengal Civil Service as a privileged but sickly young man. Posted to Kathmandu as a junior political officer, he initially felt isolated and trapped as he struggled to keep the peace between the fiercely independent mountain kingdom and the British East India Company. Ultimately, his efforts were rewarded with an enduring friendship between Nepal and the United Kingdom. More than a biography of Hodgson and a study of political relations between countries, this book is also an in-depth look at the western Orientalist movement driven by the European Enlightenment. Hodgson, who studied Tibetan and Nepalese Buddhism, soon took interest in Nepal’s biodiversity and the region’s peoples and geography. He was also a key player in the struggle between those hoping to reshape India along British lines and those working to preserve local culture.
Charles Allen was a British writer and historian. His work focuses on India and South Asia in general. Allen's most notable work is "Kipling Sahib," a biography of Rudyard Kipling.
Background
Charles Allen was born on January 2, 1940, in Kanpur, India. He was the son of Geoffrey Allen, a political officer in north-east India, and his wife, Joan (nee Henry). A member of the sixth generation of his family to be born in India, Charles first came to England aged eight, to stay in his grandparents' house, where he read Kipling stories in first editions. His great-grandfather, Sir George Allen, had given Kipling his first job as an assistant editor of the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and published his first stories.
Education
Charles attended Canford School, Dorset, but left it with no qualifications. He spent 18 months at a college in Perugia, Italy.
Charles Allen interviewed the last generation of British administrators of India in 1974 for the BBC radio series "Plain Tales" from the Raj, which was followed by a bestselling book. While this was his most popular work, his lasting legacy as a historian lies in a series of books about earlier British residents in India, beginning with William Jones in late-18th-century Calcutta (now Kolkata), whose scholarship uncovered the past of the subcontinent, mapped its rivers for the first time, and discovered the common root of Indian and European languages.
Following "Plain Tales" there were similar broadcasts and books on those who had ruled in Africa and the far east. Charles was concerned that these oral history interviews romanticized the imperialist experience, reinforcing "old colonial attitudes in the 1970s and 1980s." He went on a process of what he called "relearning" the history of the British encounter with the subcontinent.
"A Mountain in Tibet" (1982) was the first of 25 books about the philologists, archaeologists, and geographers whose work became known as orientalism. This became a negative term when Edward Said wrote a scathing critique in 1978, claiming the British framed the east as a place to be judged, ruled, and cataloged as if a zoological collection.
In valuing local culture and by writing about those who uncovered India's forgotten heritage, Charles stood against major 19th-century figures such as Thomas Macaulay and James Mill, who believed India needed to be Europeanised to be civilized. He wrote several books about Buddhism and about perhaps the most important find of European archaeologists in India - the location of the Bodh Gaya complex in Bihar, now revered as the location where Buddha attained enlightenment.
Charles never hid the dark side of the empire but wanted it fairly represented. He debated with Shashi Tharoor at the Lahore literary festival in London three years ago over claims in Tharoor's book Inglorious Empire that the British impoverished the state of Kerala. Charles argued that the very reforms Tharoor said recovered Kerala were put in place at the beginning of the 19th century by a British administrator who ended corrupt local feudal rule.
He wrote a series of books with Sahib in the title – the honorific used for British men in India. These included "The Buddha and the Sahibs" (2002) and "Soldier Sahibs" (2000) about a group of soldiers and administrators in what was then called the North West Frontier, among them an Allen relative, General John Nicholson. Charles researched on the ground, going into Taliban-controlled eastern Afghanistan. He circumambulated Mount Kailash in Tibet - holy to Buddhists and Hindus, and, as the British discovered, the watershed for the major river systems of the subcontinent, as Charles wrote in A Mountain in Tibet.
After the attacks of 9/11, he wrote "God's Terrorists: The Wahhabi Cult and the Hidden Roots of Modern Jihad" (2006), which described the links between Saudi-sponsored fundamentalism today and past Islamist insurgencies in the subcontinent. The locations of camps in northern Pakistan where Osama bin Laden's fighters and Kashmiri militants trained were the same as those of Islamist training camps in the late-19th century.
Allen's most notable recent works include "Kipling Sahib: India and the making of Rudyard Kipling," a biography of Rudyard Kipling, and "Ashoka: the Search for India"s Lost Emperor," a biography of Emperor Ashoka Maurya. His most recent work, "The Prisoner of Kathmandu: Brian Hodgson in Nepal 1820-1843," was published by Haus in October 2014.
A prolific author and as Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd noted in The Spectator, "a skillful and unobtrusive editor," Allen has published books on numerous subjects from the experiences of the British in India to tales of Himalayan exploration to the birth of Buddhism in the W. Of his many published works, he is perhaps best known for one of his first professional endeavors, an oral history produced for British Broadcasting Corporation Radio, and later published as three books.
In 2004 Charles was awarded the Sir Percy Sykes gold medal by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs for services to south Asian history.
In Nepal Charles began a lifelong fascination with Buddhism - he described himself as "Buddhish."
Views
Allen was an active supporter of the rights of low-caste Dalits, opposing the injustices he saw as a child and while traveling as an adult.
Membership
Allen was a member of the Royal Geographical Society, Royal Asiatic Society, a Council Member of the Kipling Society, and a member of the Royal Society for Asian Affairs and the Frontline Club.
Frontline Club
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United Kingdom
Connections
Charles married Liz Gould in 1972. They had three children: Poppy, George, and Louise.
