Oxford uni returns stays of 39 individuals taken from small Indian village
The University of Oxford has returned the remains of 39 Indian people taken during British colonial rule.
39 members of the Naga Community in India have come to Oxford to retrieve ancestral bones(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
The University of Oxford has finally returned the remains of 39 people taken from the Naga Community in north-eastern India. A delegation of 30 people travelled from Nagaland, India, to Oxford to attend the handover ceremony at the Pitt River Museum on Monday (9 October).
The ceremony marked the return of the remains, which were mainly skulls. Laura Van Broekhoven, the museum’s director, described the event as a “historic moment” that will be passed on throughout generations.
The bones will now be taken back to the Naga community in India, where they will be buried in a memorial by the community’s tribal leaders.
39 members of the Naga Community in India have come to Oxford to retrieve ancestral bones(Image: AFP via Getty Images)
The skeleton parts were on display in the museum for many years before all human remains were removed from public view in 2020 as part of a “decolonisation process”.
Van Brokhoven described how the remains were going home after “so much red tape everywhere”.
The museum holds more than 6,000 artefacts associated with the Naga community and their culture. Many of these items were taken during British colonial rule in India and added to the museum’s collection between 1910 and 1940.
The Pitt Rivers Museum have more than 6,000 Naga artefacts (Image: AFP via Getty Images)
“The manner in which these human remains were taken away from our land leaves much for us to speculate,” Thejao Vihienuo, one of the Naga tribe leaders, told AFP.
After an Oxfordshire auction house tried to sell a Naga skull in 2025, the Museum, alongside Naga partners, worked together to stop the sale.
“I suspect that nobody would have given the skull of his father or his grandfather as a gift to another person,” Vihienuo said.
Thejao Vihienuo is a Naga tribe leader (Image: AFP via Getty Images)
On their website, the Pitt Rivers Museum describes reaching out to the Naga Nation to “work towards healing”. As part of this process, some of the descendants of the anthropologists involved in taking the remains met with members of the Naga community during their visit.
It is believed by anthropologists that the Naga people once severed the heads of their enemies to keep as trophies, in what is known as headhunting. However, they also kept the heads of their former leaders in their village centres.
The Pitt Rivers Museum has one of the world’s largest collections of Naga material. The museum has had to return the remains of a number of indigenous peoples from places like the US, New Zealand and Australia.
