Why Nagas want overseas museums to repatriate ancestral human remains in their collections

A “19th-century horned Naga human skull, Naga tribe” was listed as part of an auction scheduled for October 9 by The Swan at Tetsworth, an antiques centre based in the United Kingdom. Valued at 3,500 pounds-4,000 pounds, the Naga ancestral remains were listed alongside other human remains – “shrunken heads” and skulls from South America and West Africa.

The Naga remains were listed by The Swan as part of “The curious collector” sale alongside manuscripts, jewellery, ceramics and other objects.

When the proposed auction came the attention on October 7 of The Forum for Naga Reconciliation, comprising civil society representatives and church leaders, they demanded that the sale be stopped. The forum said it was an “inhumane and violent practice” that indigenous ancestral human remains continue to be “collector’s items in the 21st century”.

“Throughout the period of British rule, the Naga people were defined as ‘savages’ and ‘headhunters’, which are insulting tropes that continue to be perpetuated today,” said the forum. The appeal, signed by forum convenor Wati Aier, called on India and the UK to facilitate the repatriation of the remains.

On October 8, Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio sought the urgent intervention of External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar. Rio said the auctioning of human remains was an “act of dehumanisation and is considered as continued colonial violence upon our people”.

“You will agree that the human remains of any deceased person belongs to those people and their land,” said Rio.

The outrage prompted The Swan to withdraw the human remains from the auction.

Activists, scholars and experts said the auctioning of human remains symbolised the historical violence inflicted upon the Naga people, and other indigenous communities, by colonial rule.

The auction comes at a time when Western museums have been reckoning with a violent legacy of the loot and plunder of colonised populations. It also sheds light on the painstaking efforts of indigenous communities, in India and around the world, to reclaim their heritage while grappling with the scars of a painful, bloody past.

Anthropologist Dolly Kikon, a professor at the University of California Santa Cruz, told Scroll in an email that as long as ancestral human remains are possessed by museums and are in the hands of collectors, the “Nagas will remain ‘items’ and ‘savages’ and the dehumanisation will continue”.

Colonial, racist legacy

In “The Naga Headhunters of Assam”, based on notes from a lecture to the Royal Central Asian Society in May 1935, English ethnographer JP Mills describes the life and society of the indigenous community at length while explaining the “motive” behind headhunting. “I have told you of people who must seem strange and fantastic to you,” writes Mills.

According to scholar Arkotong Longkumer, the colonising British were especially obsessed with the imagery of the “warrior and headhunting” Nagas. This racist perception that colonising Europeans had of non-white people as “exotic” and inferior has contributed to a distorted understanding of the history of culture of Indigenous, colonised communities.

Longkumer notes that headhunting was central to Naga culture. “The capture of a head, it was believed, was essential for maintaining the fertility of the crops and social order,” writes Longkumer in Reform, Identity and Narratives of Belonging: The Heraka Movement in Northeast India.

Yet, the colonial fascination, as is evident in the aborted auction, persists.

In his essay, Longkumer notes that museum displays were among the several ways in which the British colonisers wielded power while creating the exotic perception of the Nagas as warriors and headhunters – the repository of Naga ancestral remains and cultural heritage held in foreign museums illustrates this.

Scholar AK Kanungo estimates that there are more than 50,000 Naga objects in the public and private collections of 43 UK museums. The objects include weapons, shields, headgear and “numerous human skulls”, according to a 2014 essay by Kanungo.

Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford alone holds 8,000 Naga objects. According to Joanna Cole, assistant curator of object collections and porovenance, a majority of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s collection of Naga objects was provided between 1910-1930s by Mills, the colonial ethnographer who spent several years in the Naga Hills and Assam, and John Henry Hutton, a colonial administrator.

Since 2020, the Pitts Rivers Museum has been reviewing its displays as part of a decolonisation effort and has removed 123 human remains, including several Naga “trophy heads” and skulls, from its exhibits.

“For many communities the fact that the bones, skulls and other ancestral remains were taken continues to be an open wound for the community,” Pitt Rivers Director Laura Van Broekhoven told Scroll in an email. “These are very meaningful and often sacred objects that are also very personal to them and they would like to see the remains return home.”

Broekhoven said it was “highly unethical” to auction the ancestral remains of communities that were taken without their consent. “[It] is offensive, unacceptable, extremely painful and disrespectful to indigenous people who consider their ancestors should come home to rest,” wrote Broekhoven, pointing out that ivory and bird eggs are protected from sale while ancestral remains are not.

“This continues the harm that started during colonial times (where our museum has its foundations) and it leads to outrage and sadness among communities that today continue to live under very difficult circumstances,” she said.

Kikon, too, said the auction highlighted the “continuing colonial violence and dehumanisation of Indigenous communities”, as well as the culpability of other organisations. “For me, this auction has underlined the ethical and moral obligations of museums, collectors, and art houses,” wrote Kikon. “They must stop this dehumanising practice.”

Bring the ancestors home?

In 2020, the Pitt Rivers Museum reached out to the Forum for Naga Reconciliation to facilitate community dialogue about the “future care and return” of Naga ancestral human remains. The same year, the Recover, Restore and Decolonise research team was formed in collaboration with Kikon and Longkumer.

The team, comprising researchers from the Naga ancestral homelands, has been holding discussions with community elders and creating awareness to make an official claim to the University of Oxford for the repatriation of 213 Naga ancestral remains housed in the Pitt Rivers Museum.

Anthropologist Kikon, who is part of the team, told Scroll that the Forum for Naga Reconciliation is facilitating this conversation that is open to all Naga people to share their thoughts about the repatriation. “We are hopeful the Naga public along with the global community will realise that repatriation of Naga human remains is connected to restoring the dignity and humanity of the Naga past and our history,” said Kikon.

Global indigenous efforts

Apart from the Naga people, Broekhoven said the museum is also in conversation with other communities, including the Shuar from Ecuador, about the future care and potential repatriation of their ancestral remains from the collections.

“The museum staff are working on reaching out to communities because we hope to return many of the human remains,” Broekhoven told Scroll in her email. According to her, the museum has facilitated repatriations to Australia and New Zealand, Canada and the United States. “For other communities, the remains do not need to return home, but they do not want their ancestors put on display, and would like to be involved in how they are cared for,” she wrote in her email.

In its explanation of the review of human remains, the museum said that visitors saw the displays “as a testament to other cultures being ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ or ‘gruesome’”. “Rather than enabling our visitors to reach a deeper understanding of each other, the displays reinforced racist stereotypes,” said the museum, which also published lists disclosing all human remains held with the institution.

The “Return Reconcile Renew” initiative by several Australian universities has been working on similar efforts while highlighting the violent, racist legacy of these human remains. The project states that “Indigenous Australian Ancestral Remains” were taken for the purposes of studying “racial science”. “Undertaken within an era of deep power imbalances between imperial powers and those they colonised, scant – if any – attention was paid to gaining permission from, or respecting the wishes of, those whose relatives’ graves were robbed,” says a project note.