Tamil Nadu is generally regarded as a political backwater as far as nationalism and anti-colonialism are concerned. However, during the nationalist era, Tamil Nadu provided for the early agitational political movements by founding the Madras Native Association and Madras Mahajana Sabha. In this paper, an attempt has been made to understand the early nationalist ideology, their aims and objectives of the two earliest political organizations, the Madras Native Association and Madras Mahajana Sabha.