Oxford hands over 39 ancestral Naga remains for return to India
A delegation from Nagaland received the remains at Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum, with plans for burial beneath a shared memorial in their home state.
By Hiroshi Ferrari ·
The University of Oxford has handed over the remains of 39 people from India's Naga community, taken during British colonial rule, for their return to India. About 30 delegates from Nagaland attended a ceremony at the Pitt Rivers Museum on Monday to mark the transfer.
The remains consist mainly of skulls and are to be brought back to Nagaland, a mountainous state in north-eastern India. Tribal leaders have said they want to give the ancestors a "respectful rest". Plans call for the remains to be buried beneath a joint memorial in a park in the state.
The handover follows a formal request made by a Naga delegation during a visit to Oxford in 2025. The museum announced in September that it would return the remains. This transfer covers the 39 ancestral remains only, rather than the museum's wider collection of material associated with Naga culture.
Museum director Laura Van Broekhoven said the occasion would be remembered in stories passed to future generations. She also described the administrative obstacles that had to be overcome before the remains could begin their journey home. They had been exhibited for decades before the museum removed them from public display in 2020 as part of a process of decolonisation.
The Pitt Rivers Museum houses more than 6,000 objects linked to Naga culture, a collection believed to be the world's largest. Most were acquired under British colonial rule in India and Myanmar, formerly Burma. Its website classifies 219 items as human remains, added between 1910 and 1940 and gathered largely by two colonial administrators who also worked as anthropologists.
The museum's account of that period says objects were often seized during punitive military expeditions rather than given voluntarily. While in Oxford, members of the Naga delegation met descendants of one of the anthropologists involved in collecting the remains.
Tribal leader Thejao Vihienuo told AFP that uncertainty remained about how the remains had been removed from Naga land. He questioned whether anyone would willingly have presented the skull of a father or grandfather to another person as a gift.
Anthropologists say Naga communities formerly took enemies' heads as trophies through head hunting, while also keeping the heads of their own chiefs in village centres. Founded in the 19th century, the Pitt Rivers Museum has previously repatriated human remains to indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
