Historical investigations often straitjacket India’s Adivasi populace into static caricatures of backwardness and primitiveness. The epistemic violence wrought by British colonialists and Brahminical ideologues continues through time by creating colonial binaries that depict Adivasis as savage others and habitual rebels. This chapter aims to dismantle the distorted representations written over time by discarding the archetypal construct of ‘tribe’. It suggests weightage to Adivasi-centric historical narratives based on lived experiences, political assertions and cultural transformations, taking the case of Chhotanagpur, Central Provinces and Santal Parganas. The chapter critically maps how colonial racism repackaged the pre-existing local caste-based prejudices, a reframing process that led to the production of ‘sub-Orientalist’ literature. Rather than constitutive and concerted acts of anti-colonial assertions, the Adivasi uprisings were shelved off as isolated, sporadic events. The chapter demands an epistemological shift towards a decolonial praxis by listening to the Adivasi voices within the archives and beyond, and rewriting the Adivasis as storytellers and thinkers, reasserting their agency and reconfiguring their worlds.