Oxford’s Colonial Accounting: 39 Nagas and a Century of Delay

For over a century, the skulls of thirty-nine Naga ancestors rested inside the storage cabinets of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, catalogued as ethnographic evidence of Britain’s imperial reach. Only now, after decades of academic hoarding and years of formal negotiations, are these human remains finally returning to northeast India. The decision highlights how Western academic institutions continue to treat the obvious restitution of plunder as a complex administrative achievement.

The process reached its formal turning point earlier this year when Oxford received an official claim for forty sets of ancestral remains. By July, university authorities approved the return of thirty-nine, withholding a single set on the grounds that it lacked a sufficiently clear provenance connecting it to the Naga people. It is a curiously meticulous distinction for an institution whose original acquisition methods were anything but refined.

Most of these artifacts were accumulated between 1910 and 1940 by colonial administrators John Henry Hutton and James Philip Mills. Far from being gathered through voluntary exchanges or neutral scientific inquiry, these items and human remains were frequently seized during violent punitive military expeditions against indigenous villages. The museum itself admits that this historical collecting was far from a peaceful exercise, acknowledging that 219 items in its vast collection of thousands of Naga artifacts consist of or contain human remains, including 178 objects made with human hair.

While the museum quietly pulled all human remains from its public displays in 2020, institutional wheels move notoriously slowly when actual ownership is at stake. The director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Laura Van Broekhoven, described the process as humbling, remarking that she felt honoured that we walked alongside our partners to find the path to return for these 39 Naga ancestors, who have been away from their homeland for far too long. Such self-flattering vocabulary neatly reframes the lingering handover of stolen remains as a joint journey of moral enlightenment.

For the Naga community, however, the meaning of this restitution is far more straightforward. Represented by the Forum for Naga Reconciliation, indigenous groups noted that Repatriation, for the Nagas, is not simply about bones and ancestral remains finding their way back to the land but importantly about memory returning to where it belongs. A Naga delegation will soon travel to Britain to accompany the remains home, leaving Oxford with one fewer room of colonial trophies and one fewer excuse for delay.

Written by Thorben Thiede thorben.thiede@alpineweekly.com