Oxford museum returns 39 ancestral Naga remains to India

The University of Oxford has returned the remains of 39 people taken from the Naga community during British colonial rule, with plans for the ancestral remains—most of them skulls—to be buried beneath a joint memorial in India’s Nagaland state.

Around 30 people travelled from Nagaland to a handover ceremony at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum on Monday. The museum signed an agreement with Naga leaders, who described the remains as being on their way to a “respectful rest”.

Museum director Laura Van Broekhoven called the handover “a historic moment” and said the remains were finally on their way home after overcoming “so much red tape”.

The remains had been displayed at the museum for decades before being removed from public view in 2020 as part of what the museum described as a decolonisation process. Naga leaders formally requested their return during a visit to Oxford in 2025; the museum announced in September that it would hand them back.

The return concerns 39 ancestral remains, not the museum’s wider Naga collection. The Pitt Rivers Museum holds more than 6,000 objects associated with Naga culture, which it says is believed to be the world’s largest such collection. Its website lists 219 human remains, added to the collection between 1910 and 1940. The museum says objects gathered during that period were “frequently confiscated during punitive military expeditions, rather than freely given”.

Naga leader Thejao Vihienuo told AFP that the circumstances in which the remains were taken left much to speculation. He said he suspected nobody would have given away a father’s or grandfather’s skull as a gift. The delegation also met descendants of one of the anthropologists involved in collecting the remains.