India, Jan. 23 -- A few years ago, historian Shashank Shekhar Sinha was sightseeing in Mandu, the fortress town in Madhya Pradesh, accompanied by a local tour guide. The young man's stories about the place were so inaccurate and fantastical, he says, "that I was finding it difficult to understand or relate to the monuments".

Sinha taught history for a decade at University of Delhi, then worked with Oxford University Press before taking on his current position, as publishing director for South Asia at Routledge.

"The structures were so fascinating," he says, of the 14th-century palaces, mosques, ornamental water bodies, unusually shaped stone structures, and tombs at Mandu, "but the explanations seemed to float free from history."

India...