Charles Robin Allen (2 January 1940 – 16 August 2020) was a British freelance writer and popular historian from London.
Charles Allen was born in present-day Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India, where six generations of his family served under the British Raj.
Later when Allen had returned to England he heard about the exploits of his great-grandfather, Colonel St G. C. Gore, Surveyor-General of India from 1899 to 1904, who had spent a lot of time in the Himalayas.
Following his work with Voluntary Service Overseas, Allen embarked on a Himalayan Trek which won him the Sunday Telegraph Traveler of the year trophy in 1967.
[4][5] Success as a writer, came in 1974 via his involvement with the BBC Radio 4 oral history series and subsequent book Plain Tales from the Raj.
As Allen stated in the preface to the book, "It was my good luck to attend Michael Mason, as chela to his guru, serving my apprenticeship as an oral historian by being sent out with a bulky tape-recorder to interview 'survivors' of the British Raj in their homes."
[7] Allen also trekked and climbed extensively in the Himalayas, arctic Norway, the jungles of Sarawak and in 1979 was among the first foreigners for many years to reach "Cow Mouth" which is the traditional source of the Ganges River which lies at 3,962m (13,000 feet) above sea level, in the Gangotri glacier.
Allen was criticised for not acknowledging the subcontinent's natural and political history during the British rule by Edward Said in his book Orientalism.