Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum will return 39 Naga ancestral remains

The Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford said on Monday it is preparing to send 39 sets of human remains back to the Naga community in northeast India. The university council approved the return on 13 July after a claim filed in February by the Forum for Naga Reconciliation and allied groups. The original request covered 40 sets. One stayed in Oxford because, the university said, it does not have a clear provenance as Naga. A handover date has not been fixed.

Museum director Laura Van Broekhoven wrote to Rev. Wati Aier, convenor of the Forum, that the remains have been away from their homeland for far too long. She said the museum would now work with the Forum, the Naga tribe hohos, and the Recover, Restore and Decolonise team toward bringing the ancestors home. Rev. Ellen Konyak Jamir, who coordinates that research group and sits on the Forum, told reporters in Dimapur that Van Broekhoven first approached the Forum in 2020. A Naga delegation of hoho leaders, elders and researchers visited the museum on 9 June 2025 and saw the remains for the first time.

Pitt Rivers holds the world's largest collection of Naga material. A museum note lists 219 items as Naga human remains: 39 ancestral remains, mostly skulls, and 178 objects that contain or may contain human hair. Monday's decision covers the 39 ancestors. The hair objects are a later argument. Many of the pieces were taken by colonial administrators in the early twentieth century and logged as ethnographic specimens. The museum removed all human remains from public display in 2020.

The Forum and partner organisations said repatriation is not only about bones finding their way back to the land. It is also about memory returning to where it belongs. The Naga side has said the remains will arrive in Dimapur and rest in a joint memorial, intended as a place of healing and as a sign of Naga oneness. That destination matters. Naga communities span Nagaland and adjoining hill districts. A single resting place is a political as well as a ritual choice.

Oxford's process is slow by design. A claim goes to the university council, not only to the museum director. Provenance is checked item by item. The rejected fortieth set is the proof of that filter. Critics of such returns say museums lose teaching collections. The Naga claim answers that a teaching collection built from unconsented graves is not a neutral archive. The 2020 decision to take remains off display had already conceded part of that argument. The 13 July vote conceded the rest for 39 people.

Dolly Kikon and Arkotong Longkumer, two Naga academics based in the United Kingdom, lead the research network that documented the holdings. Their work sat under the Forum rather than under a state ministry. That route let tribal hohos and church figures speak as the claimants. The Indian government is not the addressee on Van Broekhoven's letter. The addressee is Aier. That is the diplomatic texture of this return: a university council, a reconciliation forum, and a museum that once labelled skulls as curios.

The ceremony date will be the next public fact. Until it is set, the 39 remain in Oxford storage. The letter has gone. The council minute exists. What remains is a flight, a receiving party in Dimapur, and a grave that has been empty for a century.