Oxford University's Pitt Rivers Museum was to hand over Monday the remains of 39 people taken during Britain's colonial rule in India to a delegation from its Naga community. A delegation of almost 30 people from northeastern Nagaland, a mountainous state bordering Myanmar, has travelled to Britain for the ceremony, which one of the tribal leaders, Thejao Vihienuo, called "a very historical occasion for our people". The handover comes as part of a broader trend of Western museums reassessing how they acquired exhibits from other cultures, particularly human remains, and in some cases returning them.
The Pitt Rivers, an ethnographic museum founded in the 19th century, has already handed back human remains to Indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The Oxford museum has more than 6,000 objects representing Naga culture, the largest collection in the world, and is giving back "ancestral human remains", mainly skulls, to the Naga people. Museum director Laura Van Broekhoven hailed this as "really historical" and a "solemn moment". The museum only removed all human remains from display in 2020, much later than most museums, and still has around 2,700 remains in storage, she told AFP.
These "were collected in times that had different ethics, different thinking, which was not unproblematic when we look at it with the eyes of today," she acknowledged. - 'Respectful rest' -Housed in a Victorian Gothic building, the museum is a dark atmospheric space with glass cases crammed with objects, many with handwritten labels. Naga tribal leaders have united for the handover and plan to bury the remains together under a joint memorial, Vihienuo, president of the Angami tribe's public organisation, told AFP. "We shall put them to respectful rest," said the 73-year-old, draped in a traditional shawl.
He visited with other Nagas last year as part of a lengthy process. "It's been six years of working alongside each other on a very delicate matter," the museum director said. The Naga remains were brought to Oxford between roughly 1910 and 1940. Most were collected by two colonial administrators who were anthropologists. But the museum says on its website that such collections were "frequently confiscated during punitive military expeditions, rather than freely given". While in Oxford, the delegation met descendants of one of the anthropologists.
"The manner in which these human remains were taken away from our land leaves much for us to speculate," said Vihienuo. "I suspect that nobody would have given the skull of his father or his grandfather as a gift to another person."
