In the morose confines of the dirt-streaked building that houses the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), change is afoot. In June 2014, Yellapragada Sudershan Rao, an obscure 69-year-old historian from Kakatiya University in Andhra Pradesh, was appointed its head. The appointment raised a firestorm of protest from academics around the country. Rao’s academic credentials were doubtful—he hadn’t written a single academic paper in a peer-reviewed journal. But what he had going