A STEPPE IN TIME

The late historian Charles Allen’s last bbok—Aryans—delves into the origins of these enigmatic peoples and the controversies surrounding them

- Razib Khan

ARYANS: The Search for a People, a Place, and a Myth
by Charles Allen HACHETTE ₹799; 400 pages

Charles Allen’s Aryans: The Search for a People, a Place, and a Myth is a tour de force survey of the latest that we know about these enigmatic people, informed by linguistics, history, archaeology, and, now, genetics. Born in Kanpur in 1940 as the sixth generation of a family of British officials in India, Allen developed a life-long interest in the Indian subcontinent. Aryans was his swan song, the culmination of a lifetime of fascination with these long-lost people and an abiding interest in their origins. He died in 2020, with the book unedited. That task was left to Allen’s collaborator David Loyn, who insists he has made no original contribution to the text.

Due to the reality that in the 19th century, Sanskrit was arguably the oldest recorded Indo-European language, the speculation around the homeland of these peoples often focused on Central and South Asia. Aryans or