Indian history provided different ways of viewing the forests and forest dwellers within ever-changing contexts and perceptions. For the Adivasis, forest was not unknown, remote and wild but it was their home. Forest is crucial for Adivasis because it has material, spiritual and aesthetic values to them. The British drastically changed the traditional forests and water resource management practices to fulfilling their imperial objectives, such as the extraction of maximum revenue. This chapter seeks to explore the contestation over forest rights in Manbhum, Bengal district in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the Forest Acts of 1865 and Forest Act of 1878, state control over the forest was established in the late nineteenth century. The loss of forest rights of the Adivasi led to Adivasi protests. By the end of the nineteenth century, the landlords of Bihar and Bengal began to deprive the Adivasis of their customary use of the forests.