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Oxford museum returns ancestral Naga skulls to India

Anbarasan Ethirajan,Global affairs correspondentand
Nikita Yadav,BBC News, Delhi
AFP via Getty Images A Naga delegation poses for a group photo at the end of a ceremony at Oxford University's Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on November 9, 2026, to mark the return of the remains of 39 people taken during Britain's colonial era to the Naga community in northeast India. AFP via Getty Images
A delegation of 30 people had travelled to Oxford from India's Nagaland

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

A delegation of around 30 people from Nagaland, a mountainous state in north-eastern India, attended a ceremony at Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum on Monday to mark the handover.

The remains, most of which are skulls, 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 it 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 human remains were displayed at the Oxford museum for decades before being removed from public view in 2020 as part of what it described as a "decolonisation process".

AFP via Getty Images Laura Van Broekhoven (L), director of the Pitt Rivers Museum and professor of museum studies, ethics and material culture, passes over the handover certificates to Ellen Konyak (R), coordinator for the Recover, Restore and Decolonise (RRaD) team, during a ceremony at Oxford University's Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on November 9, 2026, to mark the return of the remains of 39 people taken during Britain's colonial era to the Naga community in northeast IndiaAFP via Getty Images
The museum formally handed over the remains and signed an agreement with Naga leaders on Monday

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.

These were added to the museum's collection between 1910 and 1940 and mostly collected by two colonial administrators who were anthropologists.

The museum's website mentions that the objects collected during this 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.

"The manner in which these human remains were taken away from our land leaves much for us to speculate," one of the tribal leaders, Thejao Vihienuo, told AFP.

"I suspect that nobody would have given the skull of his father or his grandfather as a gift to another person."

Anthropologists say that 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 and 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.