Oxford to return 39 Naga ancestral remains from Pitt Rivers in November

Oxford University has agreed to return 39 ancestral human remains of the Naga people that were taken during British colonial rule and held for decades at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Naga Tribe Hohos and the Forum for Naga Reconciliation said on Saturday that a delegation will travel to Oxford to claim the remains. The handover is scheduled for November. Museum director Laura Van Broekhoven told The New York Times it will be the largest repatriation of human remains the museum has carried out.

The Pitt Rivers collection is the largest Naga holding in the world. It includes about 8,000 objects. Reuters has previously put the human remains in that collection at 41, mainly skulls, plus 178 objects that contain or may contain human hair. The museum took all human remains off public display in 2020. Blue boards now stand where the cases used to be.

Formal talks began in 2020. A Naga team visited the museum in 2025. That visit produced the Naga Oxford Declaration on Repatriation, signed by leaders of several tribal hohos. The declaration described the return as a step toward what it called the healing and wholeness of the Naga people. It also asked forgiveness for the delay in reclaiming the dead.

The remains were taken from burial grounds and battlefields in the Naga hills, a region that now sits across Nagaland, Manipur, Arunachal Pradesh and parts of Myanmar. Historians say some were removed by colonial officers. Others were taken after armed encounters. Headhunting was practised in parts of the hills for centuries. That history was used, at the time, to justify collecting skulls as specimens.

What happens after the boxes leave Oxford is the harder question. Naga society is not a single church or a single customary court. Tribes differ on burial, on whether remains should go to a common memorial or to specific villages, and on how to treat objects that also contain hair. Dolly Kikon, a Lotha Naga anthropologist who has worked on the file, has written that standing beside the stored remains produced a specific grief: the dead had been catalogued, numbered and stored far from the graves that were built for them.

The Recover, Restore and Decolonise team, working under the Forum for Naga Reconciliation, spent five years holding meetings in districts, churches and colleges before the Oxford visit. The work was not only legal. It was an attempt to get a common Naga position before any crate was opened. That consensus is still incomplete. Some families want individual identification. The museum records will not always allow it. Colonial accession notes are thin. Names are often missing. Dates are approximate.

British law does not make the return automatic. Human remains in English museums sit in a grey zone between property, heritage and the dead. Campaigners in the United Kingdom have asked Parliament for a statute that would protect ancestral remains and set a process for claims. No such Act is in force. The Pitt Rivers decision is therefore an institutional one, not a court order. Van Broekhoven has said other groups are also in talks with the museum.

The November ceremony will not empty the Naga shelves. Thousands of objects stay in Oxford. Spears, textiles, jewellery and household tools remain catalogued as a research collection. Naga representatives have treated the human remains as the first and non-negotiable claim. Objects can wait. Bones cannot.

For India the case sits next to other pending returns: Ainu remains from the Natural History Museum in London went back to Hokkaido earlier this year. Australian and Canadian museums have sent remains to Aboriginal and First Nations communities for two decades. The Naga case is unusual because the claimants live in a region that is still politically unsettled, with parallel Naga political groups and an unfinished peace process with New Delhi.

Once the remains reach Dimapur or Kohima, the next dispute will be local. Who speaks for which ancestor. Which village receives which crate. Whether a common ossuary is acceptable to Baptist churches that have long opposed older funerary rites. Those arguments will not be settled in Oxford. They will be settled in the hills the collectors left.

The museum's own language has shifted. Staff now speak of belongings rather than specimens. That change is editorial as much as moral. It does not undo the original taking. It does set a date on which 39 people stop being inventory.

November is close. The delegation still has to agree the packing protocol, the route, and the rite that will meet the crates when they land. Those details will decide whether the return is treated as a completed act or as the start of a longer accounting for the rest of the collection.