Thirty nine Naga ancestral remains, mostly skulls, were formally handed over at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford University to begin their journey home.
Why 39 skulls returning from Oxford matter more than the Kohinoor
In a few weeks the hill at Kisama will come alive for the Hornbill Festival. Domestic tourists from across India and visitors from around the world, including from Britain, will arrive in Kohima to experience Naga culture. Their visit this year comes at a special moment, because thirty nine ancestral Naga remains, mostly skulls taken during British rule, were formally handed over at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford University to begin their journey home after more than a hundred years abroad.
The British did not just visit Nagaland. After prolonged wars in the nineteenth century they made Kohima the headquarters of Naga Hills District in 1881 and ruled till 1947. Officers like J H Hutton and J P Mills, who wrote the most detailed early books about Naga tribes, were also administrators who ordered punitive expeditions where villages were burnt, and skulls and cultural objects were taken as trophies. Much of this material reached Oxford, which now accepts that some of it was collected under violent and coercive conditions.
For generations, those skulls were kept in drawers, catalogued with numbers and studied as specimens. The cultural bond between the living and the dead was ignored. This was part of a larger colonial habit that reduced Naga society to the single image of headhunting, so it could be displayed as curiosity, instead of being understood as a society with village republics, customary laws and deep ties to ancestral land.
The return did not happen through shouting on social media. It happened through patient dialogue. In 2020 Pitt Rivers removed human remains from public display and opened conversations, with Naga anthropologist Dolly Kikon helping make first contact. Later the Forum for Naga Reconciliation through its Recover, Restore and Decolonise initiative, along with tribal hohos, churches and scholars, carried forward consultations across the Naga homeland. In July 2026 Oxford University Council approved the return of thirty nine remains, and on November 9 the formal handover took place.
Whenever Britain returns something to India, people immediately say bring back the Kohinoor. The Kohinoor is shiny, famous and full of masala, kept in the Tower of London, and Britain can still argue it was a gift under a treaty from Maharaja Duleep Singh. A human skull allows no such argument. It cannot be called a gift or property. It forces Britain to face how empire actually worked on the Naga frontier, not in palaces but in burnt villages. Returning thirty nine ancestors is therefore morally far more important than debating a diamond, because one is about wealth and the other is about human dignity.
Hornbill Festival this year reverses that old flow. The British once took Naga culture to Oxford to display it, but today Nagaland invites India and the world to Kisama to experience that culture on Naga terms, with hospitality and pride. For all visitors, there is now a deeper story to share, that until last month real ancestors from these traditions were lying in a drawer in Oxford as numbered objects, and that cultural exchange must be built on respect for history, not just on photography.
Perhaps the most powerful lesson is that the dead have united the living. For years Naga public life has been marked by divisions where unity is spoken about but rarely practised. Yet these thirty nine silent ancestors brought different tribes, organisations and civil society to one table for years with a shared purpose. Those once treated as objects have become teachers of belonging.
The plan is to lay them to rest at Naga Solidarity Park in Kohima. That is important, but it should be a beginning, not an end. Naga history must be increasingly researched from Naga sources and oral traditions. Remaining Naga collections abroad must be transparently checked for how they were taken, with community consent. And the spirit of reconciliation must also be turned inward, because it is easy to condemn colonial violence, but harder to acknowledge the divisions we have carried afterwards. As late peace activist Niketu Iralu said, hate not transformed is transferred to the next generation.
In December, when the last drum fades at Kisama and visitors from across India and the world head home, thirty nine ancestors will have travelled seven thousand kilometres in the opposite direction to finally rest in their own soil. They were taken as curiosities but return as reminders. While the Kohinoor may continue to glitter behind glass in London, these ancestors are coming home to teach us something more valuable than shine.