Never pissed off Indians especially when they're accused of Muslim oppression because they would push back HARDCORE..
This is an interesting question. As an outsider one should always be aware of the limitations of one's knowledge and perspective. Indeed I think it is reasonable to cultivate an attitude of humility, of listening more than one speaks. Yet in the final analysis it is truth that matters, not its provenance.
As a practical matter, I find outsider perspectives most useful when they are addressing matters that are politically laden within the nation in question, yet unladen outside of it. In the case of India I am thinking specifically of the "debate" over India's historical genealogy. Western academics inform us that India was settled in several distinct waves over tens of thousands of years, with the current majority population in North India arriving much later than Dravidian peoples of Southern India. This narrative, however, is unpalatable to the Hindutva crowd because it implies that India was not a harmonious Hindu nation that was subsequently violated by the arrival of Muslims and Europeans, but rather that the current Hindu majority were themselves once interlopers like the despised Muslims. Hence many Hindutva academics spin an alternate narrative whereby
India is the origin of the Proto-Indo-Europeans who subsequently went off to settle Persia and Europe: the "Out of India" theory.
Without devoting years of one's life to studying the matter, who do you believe? The western academics who give zero fucks about the political implications of their genealogical investigations, or the Hindutva academics who need the historical narrative to match up with a (frankly appalling) contemporary political project? I know who I'm going with.