OMM Newsroom
The University of Oxford has returned the remains of 39 people taken from the Naga community during British colonial rule in India, the BBC reported.
A delegation of about 30 people from Nagaland, a mountainous state in north-eastern India, attended a handover ceremony at the university’s Pitt Rivers Museum on Monday.
Most of the remains are skulls. They will be taken to India and given what Naga tribal leaders have called a “respectful rest”. Plans call for them to be buried beneath a joint memorial in a park in Nagaland.
Museum director Laura Van Broekhoven described the handover as “a historic moment that will be part of stories told to next generations”. She said the remains were finally on their way home after overcoming “so much red tape everywhere”.
The remains had been displayed at the museum for decades before being removed from public view in 2020 as part of what the museum called a “decolonisation process”.
The Pitt Rivers Museum holds more than 6,000 objects associated with Naga culture, believed to be the world’s largest collection of its kind. Most were acquired during British colonial rule in India and Myanmar, formerly Burma. The museum’s website lists 219 items as human remains.
The remains were added to the collection between 1910 and 1940 and were mostly collected by two colonial administrators who were anthropologists. The museum says objects collected during that period were “frequently confiscated during punitive military expeditions, rather than freely given”.
During their visit to Oxford, the Naga delegation also met descendants of one of the anthropologists involved in collecting the remains. Tribal leader Thejao Vihienuo told AFP: “The manner in which these human remains were taken away from our land leaves much for us to speculate.” He added: “I suspect that nobody would have given the skull of his father or his grandfather as a gift to another person.”
Anthropologists say the Naga people once practised head hunting, severing the heads of enemies as trophies. They also kept the heads of their own chiefs at the centres of villages.
Founded in the 19th Century, the Pitt Rivers Museum has previously returned human remains to Indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
The latest handover concerns only the 39 ancestral remains. It follows a visit by a Naga delegation to Oxford in 2025, when it formally requested their return. The museum announced in September that the remains would be returned to India.
