Hi Maya, thanks for your question. Here's what I recommend for when you're trying to jump head-first into the scholarly writings concerning a place you know nothing about.

My first port of call is always Wikipedia. Not because Wikipedia is a reliable source, but because Wikipedia is designed to give you an encyclopedic overview. While an expert on any given subject could spend days picking apart a Wikipedia article on their topic area, using Wikipedia to familarize yourself with a period before delving into the real scholarship has a few advantages. The first is the obvious fact that Wikipedia is written for laypeople who have no prior knowledge of a topic. That makes you the target audience!

The second though, and this is why I recommend it in particular, is that Wikipedia will often give you a good overview of the "received knowledge" about a topic. Say I want to read some academic articles about archaeological finds relating to the Fremont culture in 11th century Utah. (Yes, this is a real example from my life...) The author says that they're going to make an argument that changes the way we think about trade networks among the Fremont. Well, that's all well and good, but if I don't know the way "we think" about trade networks already, I'm not really going to get the impact of their big grand argument, am I? So that's where I'll go to Wikipedia or another online encyclopedia like Brittanica to get the gist beforehand. In a situation like this, you're going in with the expectation that what you read on the website is going to be disproven or at least challenged by the article you read next. I know you said you already tried with a general Indian history textbook, but honestly Wikipedia is just so much more user-friendly with its links taking you to other concepts you don't understand and its easily broken down sections.

If it's a topic I'd like to spend more time getting to know, I also like to look at materials about the topic aimed at children. I did this when I moved to Scotland and wanted to study Scotland in more depth. I knew that the scholars would be making all these great arguments, but that I would be completely lost in them without the basic cultural reference points they expected their readers to have. So I checked a book out of the local library that was a children's guide to Scottish history. Of course plenty in it turned out not to be the most factually accurate, but just as with Wikipedia, it gave me my bearings. Since you have already developed critical thinking skills in your familiar area of United States history, once you grasp the basics of the topic at hand, I'm sure you will be able to apply yourself well in the new topic.

This third one may be a little unorthodox, but it works for me. One of the challenges when diving into the history of a region with unfamiliar languages is that it is hard to distinguish the names in your mind at first. This happened to me when I started studying early medieval Ireland and Scotland. So what I did is I drew little doodles of each person with a different physical appearance. These appearances were the products of my imagination since there are no images of the people from the time, but I gave each person a memorable characteristic: a bushy mustache, a big nose, little eyes, broad shoulders, a cleft chin, etc. I also tried to incorporate different personalities in the sketches based on their relevant actions in the historical narrative. Having those little drawings next to me while I was reading helped me distinguish the people, and in the long run it became much easier to distinguish them in my head because I'd already done that visually. (I even did this back in APUSH with the US presidents, associating each guy's policy with his facial hair... I still can't tell Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison apart because they have the same beards, but it worked pretty well for everyone else!)

These are all just my own techniques and I'm sure others will have their own. I hope this helps at least a little though! I know you are already quite skilled in your studies so I hope my suggestions didn't come off as patronizing, but I love to try to teach myself about aspects of world history that were previously unfamiliar to me, and these methods are where I always start.

Greetings Maya! This is a most interesting question on the practice of history, and I wholeheartedly agree with the advice u/Kelpie-Cat and u/Cixila commented on beforehand. When I found myself having to get started on the British Empire during the 19th century, Youtube videos from adequately sourced (if at times over-generalising and limited in scope) channels formed a great bit of foundational knowledge.

Getting into the scholarship however, is an entirely different kettle of fish. It is indeed daunting (and in the scope of Indian history, somewhat confusing) to get into the historiography of historical topics. I find the best place to start however, is to break down the period of the past itself. What area of Indian history did you find most intriguing or most interesting during your textbook readings? Was there a particular civilisation, time period, or even event which made you go "huh, that's interesting, I might read more on that later."?(forgive the "huh", my pathetic attempt at simulating human thoughts). If there is a sub-topic of the history which takes your fancy, then (echoing the other comments on here) consult Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, and other "general overview" sources which are not that reputable on their own. They can indeed form a "jumping-off point" for further historiographical reading and can always be referred to incase you get lost in the whole thing.

It goes without saying of course, that taking notes or making a visual "mind-map" of the basic historical details (who, what, where, when, why, and how; or the more historically-appropriated causes, course, consequences) is a great way to ensure you have that foundational knowledge down. I would like to say (and I hope I've merited saying it, or else my flair might come under question) that I've got a firm grasp of the events of 1914 and the Paris Peace Conference, but I still jot down some useful quotes from scholarly material and facts to reference from time to time.

Thirdly, being able to utilise valuable research skills (as I imagine you have already used in the course of undergraduate studies) is incredibly helpful when getting into scholarly reading. Often times the more "advanced" and historiography-heavy publications assume that you have an even greater foundational understanding of the topic than "overview" publications (which themselves deal with historiographical arguments, but do go in-depth to a decent extent on the facts of the events/person/civilisation). My recommendation is to go looking for articles or books which strike a balance between argumentative writing and contextual detailing. That way, you will at least be constantly reinforced with reminders about the bare-bones information of the topic.

These are of course, techniques which worked for me when I was reading scholarly material on my areas of expertise and even when starting new historical investigations on the Cold War or the British Empire. You of course, are a rather proficient and experienced undergraduate student however, so I imagine these techniques are at best obvious if not somewhat typical for your research efforts. Feel free to pm me any follow-ups or just let me know if you found these suggestions helpful (crossing my fingers now!).