Histories of women’s education in colonial South India have largely been framed through the administrative lens of the Madras Presidency, privileging urban centres, colonial policy narratives and missionary initiatives while marginalizing regional and local experiences within Tamil speaking areas. The paper challenges the dominance of Madras Presidency centric narratives through a regional reassessment of women’s education in Tamil regions between 1850 and 1947.The study aims to foreground local initiatives, indigenous traditions of learning and the diverse social contexts that shaped women’s access to education beyond the colonial capital and its immediate surroundings. The research draws upon a wide range of primary sources, including Madras Presidency Education Reports, district gazetteers, census data, missionary records and vernacular Tamil women’s journals and autobiographical writings. Methodologically, it adopts a regional and micro historical approach, combined with a gender sensitive reading of colonial archives, to compare district level variations and uncover marginalized voices often obscured in official records. The paper argues that women’s education in Tamil regions was neither a uniform colonial imposition nor a passive reception of state policy. Instead, it emerged through complex negotiations involving caste, community, religion and locality, with significant contributions from Tamil reformers, women educators and indigenous institutions. The study decentrers administrative frameworks and foregrounds regional diversity to demonstrate that Tamil regions functioned as dynamic educational spaces with distinct and autonomous trajectories of change. The paper contributes to the historiography of women’s education in reorienting analysis toward regional histories, vernacular sources and women’s agency, thus offering a more nuanced understanding of colonial era educational transformations.