Oxford museum returns ancestral Naga skulls to India

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". 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".

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).