> Over the past decade, in Russia and then India, I have been asked versions of this question hundreds of times: Who are you to come here and tell us what is wrong with our system? And it’s true, the whole enterprise of foreign correspondence has a whiff of colonialism.
I find the author's self-consciousness patronizing. India is full of people fighting this sort of thing in the country's backwaters, who appreciate the help from any source. (I don't imagine Americans find it colonialist when the Economist writes about the problems with our justice system: https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21654619-how-make-ame...).
Dude, chill a little. This is just the writer considering for a second whether she's right to be there, reporting as she is, about a land with different moral foundations than her own[0]. The rest of the article is how she thought about it and then promptly went and did what she thought was right anyway: collect evidence, take it to the police, talk to the victim's family, and report on it when these things came to nothing.
> I don't imagine Americans find it colonialist when the Economist writes about the problems with our justice system
It's disingenuous to critique a fundamentally postcolonial argument (which is what the cited quotation represents) by referencing the US and its erstwhile status as a colony of England. The US is one of the three superpowers of the world, one of the wealthiest countries of the world, and itself an imperial power, which means that under postcolonial thought, it's more analogous to English media critiquing France or Portugal. Under this same lens, that's a completely different balance (or imbalance) of power than when the US critiques India (or any other developing nation that was decolonized in the mid-20th century, of which there are a lot).
You don't have to agree with the end conclusion, but if you want to critique it, you need to engage with it as a school of thought and either address the problem using that framework or find a compelling reason to deconstruct the framework.
> a compelling reason to deconstruct the framework.
Fine. As someone from an adjacent former British colony, I find much of the Western hand-wringing about colonialism in India to be misguided and presumptuous. Much postcolonial thinking is the cultural equivalent of "Not Invented Here" syndrome. Modern Indians looking to integrate into the developed world find this sort of thing as abhorrent as western onlookers do. They want to end these practices, they don't mind being judged by the standards of the developed world, and they don't mind the impetus created by international scrutiny of these injustices.
To make it more concrete: there is an activist organization somewhere in India that is thrilled to see coverage of this issue. In the New York Times of all places!
> Much postcolonial thinking is the cultural equivalent of "Not Invented Here" syndrome.
This is very much not true, and I'd invite you to read some postcolonial theory to understand why, because those primary sources explain it in more detail than I can summarize here.
The remainder of your post after that line is factually true, and postcolonialists wouldn't even disagree with it necessarily, but that particular claim is not accurate.
I don't think it's controversial to say that postcolonialism rejects the universality of European enlightenment values. That is, in my view, a mode of "Not Invented Here" thinking. Relevant: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2013/04/how-does-the-subaltern-sp....
> There has been no really prominent body of thought associated with the Left in the last hundred and fifty years or so that has insisted on denying the scientific ethos and the applicability of categories coming out of the liberal enlightenment and the radical enlightenment — categories like capital, democracy, liberalism, rationality, and objectivity. There have been philosophers who have criticized these orientations, but they’ve rarely achieved any significant traction on the Left. Postcolonial theorists are the first to do so.
Okay, now I understand the issue. It looks like you're reading a description of postcolonialism written by someone who's explicitly opposed to the school of thought and treating that as a primary reference on the tenets of the philosophy itself.
If actually read the original essay with that title ("Can the Subaltern Speak?), you might see that Chibber's criticism is completely off-base, to the point of misrepresenting even objective facts about the principles of postcolonialism.
I find the author's self-consciousness patronizing. India is full of people fighting this sort of thing in the country's backwaters, who appreciate the help from any source. (I don't imagine Americans find it colonialist when the Economist writes about the problems with our justice system: https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21654619-how-make-ame...).