The University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum handed over the ancestral remains of 39 Naga people, most of them skulls, to a delegation from Nagaland at a ceremony on Monday, more than a century after they were taken during British colonial rule.
Nearly 30 members of the Naga community travelled from Nagaland to Britain to attend the handover ceremony, during which both sides signed a formal agreement.
The remains were already "on their way to Heathrow" airport after overcoming "so much red tape everywhere", museum director Laura Van Broekhoven said. She described the handover as "a historic moment that will be part of stories told to next generations".
The remains will be brought back to India and buried together at a joint memorial site in a park in Nagaland.
"We shall put them to respectful rest," tribal leader Thejao Vihienuo said.
"They've been here in a foreign land for more than a century," said Dr Vihuto Asumi, president of the Sumî Hoho, a Naga tribal organisation.
"We believe that their spirits are still not at rest so by doing this, we believe it will bring spiritual healing, not only to the ancestral remains here but to everyone who died during the head-hunting days," he added.
Vihienuo said the circumstances in which the remains were taken from Nagaland left much room for speculation.
"I suspect that nobody would have given the skull of his father or his grandfather as a gift to another person," he said.
The Pitt Rivers Museum holds more than 6,000 objects related to Naga culture, believed to be the largest such collection in the world. Most of the collection was acquired during British colonial rule in India and Myanmar.
According to the museum, its Naga collection includes 39 ancestral human remains, primarily skulls, and 178 other objects that contain or may contain human hair. The current handover concerns the 39 ancestral remains.
The remains were brought to Oxford between 1910 and 1940. Most were collected by two colonial administrators who were also anthropologists, including John Henry Hutton, who served in the Indian Civil Service, and James Philip Mills.
The museum's website acknowledges that objects collected during this period were "frequently confiscated during punitive military expeditions, rather than freely given".
The handover follows a formal request by a Naga delegation that visited Oxford in June 2025. The University of Oxford Council approved the return of 39 ancestral remains at a meeting on July 13, 2026, declining to return one additional remain whose Naga provenance could not be established.
The museum removed all human remains from public display in 2020 as part of its efforts to address its colonial legacy. Van Broekhoven told AFP that around 2,700 human remains were still being held in storage.
The Pitt Rivers Museum has previously returned human remains to Indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
Anthropologist Dolly Kikon, a member of Nagaland's Lotha-Naga community, said one of the remains being returned belonged to a Naga chief. She said the Naga people historically practised headhunting, taking the heads of enemies as trophies, but also kept the heads of their own chiefs at the centre of villages. (with inputs from media organisations)