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The University of Oxford has returned the remains of 39 people taken from the Naga community during British colonial rule in India, in a ceremony at the Pitt Rivers Museum attended by a delegation of around 30 people from Nagaland, a mountainous state in north-eastern India.
Most of the returned items are skulls. Naga tribal leaders have said the remains will be given what they described as a “respectful rest” and plan to bury them beneath a joint memorial in a park in Nagaland.
Museum director Laura Van Broekhoven called the handover “a historic moment that will be part of stories told to next generations,” adding that the remains were finally on their way home after overcoming “so much red tape everywhere.”
Decades on display, then removed in 2020
The human remains had been displayed at the Oxford museum for decades before being removed from public view in 2020 as part of what the institution described as a “decolonisation process.” The museum announced in September that the 39 remains would be returned to India, following a formal request made by a Naga delegation that visited Oxford in 2025.
The Pitt Rivers Museum holds more than 6,000 objects associated with Naga culture — believed to be the largest such collection in the world — most of them acquired during British colonial rule in India and Myanmar. The museum’s website lists 219 items as human remains, added to the collection between 1910 and 1940 and mostly gathered by two colonial administrators who were also anthropologists. The museum’s own records note that objects from that period were “frequently confiscated during punitive military expeditions, rather than freely given.”
“Nobody would have given the skull of his grandfather as a gift”
During their visit to Oxford, the Naga delegation met descendants of one of the anthropologists involved in collecting the remains. Tribal leader Thejao Vihienuo told AFP that the circumstances of the removal remained troubling. “The manner in which these human remains were taken away from our land leaves much for us to speculate,” he said. “I suspect that nobody would have given the skull of his father or his grandfather as a gift to another person.”
Anthropologists note that the Naga people once practised head-hunting, severing the heads of enemies as trophies, but also kept the heads of their own chiefs at the centre of villages — a distinction that underscores the particular sensitivity surrounding the provenance of the returned remains.
The Pitt Rivers Museum, founded in the nineteenth century, has previously returned human remains to indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. Monday’s handover is limited to the 39 ancestral remains now bound for Nagaland.