Charles Allen
Traveller and author of Plain Tales from the Raj who gave a voice to people who lived through Empire
CHARLES ALLEN, the writer, traveller and broadcaster who has died aged 80, was one of the last children of the Raj and an authority on the British Empire, described by Saul David in The Daily Telegraph as “a narrative historian without peer”.
Much of Allen’s work was a riposte to Edward Said’s critique of “Orientalism”. In books such as The Buddha and the Sahibs (2002) and The Prisoner of Kathmandu: Brian Hodgson in Nepal (2015), he celebrated the pioneering British Orientalists who brought Enlightenment values to the subcontinent and ferreted out its forgotten histories, such as the long-disregarded evidence of Buddhism’s roots in pre-islamic India.
He deplored the worst excesses of the Empire, however, and in Soldier Sahibs (2000) he argued that John Nicholson (one of his forebears) and the other Englishmen who administered the North-west Frontier “were more like the Taliban than like ourselves”.
Allen was perhaps most widely known for his radio documentaries, notably Plain Tales from the Raj (1974), one of Radio 4’s most popular factual series.
Billed as “a panorama of British India recorded by some of those who lived in it”, Plain Tales was devised by its producer, Michael Mason, as a corrective to the mocking spirit in which the twilight years of the Raj were usually discussed. Allen interviewed dozens of survivors, with an average age of 73.
Many of the interviewees were suspicious of the BBC following the somewhat flip television series The British Empire (1972). But as one of the contributors, the historian Philip Mason, noted, “Charles Allen was so successful at getting the confidence of the people he talked to” that they spoke with “unbuttoned ease”.
They ranged from Field Marshal Auchinleck to F Radclyffe Sidebottom, a former Bengal Pilot, and 99-year-old Mrs Grace Norie, who could remember India in the 1880s. With its evocations of panther hunts, burning ghats (“always smelling of something like roast beef ”) and ayahs who had to be instructed not to use opium to put the English children to sleep, the series was rapturously received, and More Plain Tales from the Raj swiftly followed.
The programme’s youngest contributor was Spike Milligan, who was brought up in Poona, and one critic described his account of a vibrant Armistice Day parade as “one of the most vivid things I have ever heard”.
It was Milligan, too, who told Allen the story of the soldier tried for ravishing a sacred cow: the Prosecutor opened his case with the words, “On the day of the alleged offence my client was grazing contentedly in the field.” The trial was abandoned when it transpired that “the cow had been cited in a previous case”.
Plain Tales from the Raj was the basis of Allen’s first book, published in 1977 and a bestseller.
Even old India hands could learn something from it. Reviewing the book in The Times, Paul Scott, the author of The Jewel in the Crown, was delighted to read about the “Fishing Fleet” – the young English ladies wintering in India in the hope of finding a husband – and to discover that those who went home unsuccessful were known as “the Returned Empties”.
Allen burnished his reputation as the outstanding oral historian of the Empire with further series for Radio 4:
Tales from the Dark Continent (1979), which demonstrated that Sanders of
the River was no exaggeration of the experience of British colonials in Africa, and Tales from the South China
Seas (1982-4).
Meanwhile he interviewed immigrants for New Britons (1978) and soldiers for The Savage Wars of Peace
(1988), which was especially memorable for a Gurkha officer’s casual account of having his arm amputated with a penknife after becoming trapped in the wreckage of a helicopter crash.
Allen also documented his own extensive travels. He was the first Westerner for many years to trace the source of the Ganges, as described in A
Journey to the Source (Radio 4, 1979). In 1998 he returned to the Himalayas for the television documentary The Search for
Shangri-la (BBC Two), having persuaded his somewhat reluctant friend Mark Shand to accompany him.
Weighed down by baggage that included, in the words of one reviewer, “an almost Victorian array of tableware” – “We’re too old to rough it,” said Shand – the pair were delayed by bureaucratic Chinese border guards, a yak shortage, unforgiving terrain and Shand’s altitude sickness, which made their joy at finally reaching the ancient city all the more moving.
“I’m an awful traveller. I’m constantly sick; I can’t stand Indian food and I’ve lost part of one lung,” Allen observed in 2000. Nevertheless, he was such an acknowledged expert on the subcontinent that his cousin and godson Benedict Allen, one of the world’s most widely travelled explorers, avoided the territory in deference to him.
Benedict remembered the excitement as a small boy of Charles, newly returned from Tibet, presenting him with a pair of beautifully embroidered Tibetan boots and a charm to ward off yetis. He recalled that Charles’s traveller’s tales “enabled me to believe there were wonderful horizons out there to explore … and that it was possible, without much by way of financial resources, to go and do that exploring”.
Like all modern travellers, Allen found the world to be growing smaller. In the 1970s he wanted to record some authentic folk music while making a programme about Sarawak; following a tip he travelled by longboat into the jungle where he eventually found a native man who said that he could provide him with some music. He fetched a cassette player, pressed play, and the voice of “damned Rod Stewart” began to croon
“We are sailing…”.
Charles Allen was born in Cawnpore on January 2 1940, the son of Geoffrey Allen and his wife Joan (née Henry), both of whom had been born in India. His father was one of the sixth generation of Allens to serve the Raj.
One of his ancestors was killed in a duel in Cawnpore in 1795: “He lies buried there, like so many young men who hoped to go home to die in Cheltenham,” Charles recalled. Another, Sir George Allen, founded two newspapers and gave Rudyard Kipling his first job, as a reporter with the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette.
Charles’s father became a Political Officer in the North-east Frontier Agency, and outside office hours he would sit on his verandah and adjudicate on the gripes and petitions of the hill tribespeople. “It left me with a lasting image of my father as the very embodiment of British rule in India, which I grew up believing to be essentially benevolent, even if paternalist,” Charles
recalled in Coromandel: A Personal History of South India (2017). He and his older brother Mike enjoyed a happy childhood, apart from occasional encounters with cobras, or being ticked off for playing with discarded poisoned arrows.
During the Second World War his father served with the 7th Gurkha Rifles and was awarded an MC, while the rest of the family went to live in Shillong. After partition they left for England – one of Charles’s final Indian memories was of the servants weeping over Gandhi’s assassination – and he was educated at Canford School, but did not shine academically and left at 17 to become an apprentice tea-taster.
He then studied in Perugia and qualified as a teacher before spending a year in Nepal with VSO. This was the basis for his first full-length
documentary for Radio 4, The Newars of Kathmandu (1969), in which he noted that “while other Asians on the Indian subcontinent stare and stare, until you feel like a goldfish in a bowl, the Newars ignore foreigners, in much the same way as they ignore dirt and other unpalatable facts.”
He ended his trip with a long walk through the Himalayas that secured him the Sunday Telegraph Traveller of the Year Award, and then made his name at the BBC reporting on sojourns to Japan, South Korea and elsewhere.
Among the most acclaimed of his two dozen books were Kipling Sahib
(2007), which drew on the correspondences between his own childhood and Kipling’s for a study of the author’s early life – Allan Massie in the Telegraph called it “one of the best [books] on Kipling I have read” – and
Ashoka (2012), which resurrected the Indian emperor expunged from history for embracing Buddhism.
His work often challenged those “leading Tibetologists” who “have trotted out the [13th] Dalai Lama’s view of history” and ignored the Tibetan Buddhists’ persecution of other peoples. He described his own religious views as “Buddh-ish”.
He admitted in a letter to The Guardian in June this year that there was an alternative view to “the image of British colonialism as an essentially benign institution” that Plain Tales
from the Raj had reinforced, and observed that “many more statues will have to come down before we can even think of arriving at an honest accommodation with our past”.
He insisted nevertheless that “we also need to remember that history is never black and white” – pointing out that he had opposed the erection of the statue of Gandhi in Parliament Square because of the Mahatma’s advocacy of the caste system.
Although Marxist historians and the like sometimes accused him of glorifying the Empire, Allen’s driving concern was to give voice to those who lived through it, especially those misunderstood or unheard by history.
A genial, attractive man described by The Times of India as “that seeming contradiction in terms, a voluble Englishman”, Allen completed the text of his last book shortly before his death: examining new genetic evidence for the existence of Indo-european Aryan settlers in Northern India four millennia ago, it will be published next year.
He was a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and in 2004 was awarded the Sir Percy Sykes Gold Medal by the Royal Society for Asian Affairs.
Charles Allen married, in 1972, Liz Gould, whom he had met as a fellow teacher and writer in Kathmandu, and who travelled the world with him for 50 years. She survives him with their son and two daughters.