Abstract: This article examines the politics of female intellectualism in Indian English fiction, arguing that women’s acts of thinking function as epistemic resistance within patriarchal and postcolonial structures. While feminist literary criticism has extensively addressed silence, trauma, domestic confinement, and caste-gender oppression, comparatively less attention has been paid to the disciplining of female cognition and the regulation of women as knowers. Drawing upon theories of epistemic injustice, feminist standpoint epistemology, and postcolonial feminist critique, this study analyses Gauri in The Lowland, Virmati in Difficult Daughters, Jaya in That Long Silence, and Draupadi in The Palace of Illusions. The article demonstrates that intellectual autonomy in these texts produces social anxiety because it disrupts patriarchal pedagogy that conditions women toward compliance and relational prioritisation. The thinking of women is constantly characterised as emotional pathology, selfishness, or moral danger. Instead of leading to liberatory triumph, the intellectual agency of feminism is a precarious, relational, and morally fraught form of resistance. Through its focus on cognitive autonomy as a form of political struggle, this project extends the Indian feminist literary studies tradition from bodily and spatial subjugation to epistemic liberation.. Indian women’s fiction, it argues, positions thought itself as a site of structural contestation, revealing that the right to interpret, question, and theorise one’s condition constitutes a radical feminist claim. Keywords: epistemic injustice, feminist standpoint, cognitive autonomy, patriarchal pedagogy, Indian English fiction, feminist intellectual labour.