Oxford museum returns 39 ancestral Naga skulls to India

The University of Oxford has returned the remains of 39 people taken from the Naga community during British colonial rule in India. Most of the remains are skulls.

At a ceremony at Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum on Monday, the remains were formally handed over. A delegation of around 30 people from Nagaland, a mountainous state in north-eastern India, had travelled to Oxford to attend the ceremony.

The remains will be taken back to India and given what Naga tribal leaders have described as a 'respectful rest'. There are plans to bury them under a joint memorial in a park in Nagaland.

Museum director Laura Van Broekhoven described the handover as 'a historic moment'. She said it would 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'.

On Monday, the museum formally handed over the remains and signed an agreement with Naga leaders.

The human remains were displayed at the Oxford museum for decades. They were removed from public view in 2020 as part of what the museum described as a 'decolonisation process'.

According to the museum's website, the items were added to its collection between 1910 and 1940. Most were collected by two colonial administrators who were also anthropologists.

The museum's website notes that objects collected during this period were 'frequently confiscated during punitive military expeditions, rather than freely given'.

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 were acquired during British colonial rule in India and Myanmar (the former Burma). The museum's website lists 219 items as human remains.

During their visit to Oxford, the Naga delegation also met descendants of one of the anthropologists involved in collecting the remains.

One of the tribal leaders, Thejao Vihienuo, told the news agency 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. But they also kept the heads of their own chiefs at the centre of villages.

The Pitt Rivers Museum, founded in the 19th century, has previously returned human remains to indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand and the US.

The latest handover to India concerns only the 39 ancestral remains. It comes after a visit by a Naga delegation to Oxford in 2025, when it formally requested their return. The museum had announced in September that the remains would be returned to India.