After the First World War Thambi Naidoo of the SA Indian Congress took his teenage daughters, Thayanayagie and Seshammal, with him to speak out against the The Asiatics (Land and Trading) Amendment Act (Transvaal), 37/1919. In 1913, Seshammal, a toddler, had been in prison with her mother in Pietermaritzburg. Though younger, Seshammal was the more confident and assertive of the sisters and she composed her own speeches. Thambi had to help Thayanayagie with hers. Thayanayagie and Seshammal married the brothers, Perumal and Sooboo Pillay of the Asiatic Bazaar (Marabastad) and went to live in Pretoria. Seshammal died in 1935. In 1946, when the Natal and Transvaal Indian Congresses, organised the Passive Resistance Campaign after the Asiatic Land Tenure and Representation Act /46 (“The Ghetto Act”) was passed, Thayanayagie helped Maniben Sita to organise a batch of women resisters from the Asiatic Bazaar. The members of the group included Thayanayagie, Maniben, Amina Jeeva, Thunga Dharmalingam (later Kollapen), Mrs Jassoobhen Gandhi, her sixteen-year old sister, Gowrie Bharoochie, Beta and Razi Mooloo, Muniamma and Shunmugam Pillay. Most of these women were under twenty. In September 1946, they were called to take their stand at the Gale Street site in Durban. They were arrested, sentenced to a month in jail, and taken to Pietermartizburg Prison, the same prison in which Thayanayagie’s mother and Seshammal had been detained in 1913.

After 1948, the resistance movement was directed against the new apartheid laws and when the Defiance Campaign began in 1952, Thayanayagie volunteered and marched in the Germiston batch led by Patrick Duncan on 8 December. The protesters were arrested and sentenced to three months in prison. Thayanayagie was proud to be able to serve the community in this way and she remained active in demonstrations during the fifties. She was one of the twenty thousand women who marched to the Union Buildings on 9 August 1956. In 1959, when the Treason Trial moved to the synagogue in Pretoria, Thayanayagie got a group of women together and organised meals for the accused. She provided breakfast and lunch daily from 1959 to 1961 when the trial ended. She remained a committed activist until the time of her death in 1991.

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