Nagaland: history

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Naga history in museums

The Pitt Rivers Museum in England’s Oxford

As in 2023

From Tora Agarwala, A group of Nagas is leading India’s first overseas ancestral remains repatriation efforts. The Indian Express, April 11, 2023

The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England, recently took its collection of "human remains" and other "insensitive" exhibits off display in a bid to "decolonize" their collections. This move was prompted by Dolly Kikon, a Lotha Naga anthropologist who requested the return of ancestral Naga human remains displayed at the museum for more than 100 years. This request has spurred a community-led initiative among the Nagas to bring their ancestral remains home, possibly the first such effort to repatriate ancestral human remains of an indigenous community in India or even South Asia.

The Pitt Rivers Museum has a vast collection of 500,000 items acquired over more than 130 years of British imperialism, including the largest collection of Naga material remains in the world, which includes everyday items such as clothes, agricultural tools, archery and weapons, basketry, ceramics, and human ancestral remains (skulls and bones). Most of the human remains were collected by two colonial administrators, John Henry Hutton and James Philip Mills in the early 1900s.

Since 2017, the museum has been engaged in an "ethical review" of its permanent displays, with a bid to "decolonize" its collections. The decision to take off human remains was part of this objective. For Kikon, it has always been "disturbing" to see Naga objects being displayed as "exotic and primitive" in museums across the world. These objects were taken away as souvenirs and artifacts under duress during colonial expeditions, and this has led to the Nagas feeling disconnected from their cultural heritage.

After the email, the museum reached out to the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR) to begin the conversation on repatriation. Now, the collective is the chief facilitator of the process. The FNR, in collaboration with Kikon and Arkotong Longkumer, another Naga anthropologist, based in Edinburgh, formed a Naga research team called "Recover Restore and Decolonize" (RRaD) in 2020. In the past two years, the RRaD team comprising Nagas from all walks of life is conducting interviews, holding community-facing meetings, and generating public awareness about the initiative on a voluntary basis. It is only the first step before they build a case to make an official claim to the University of Oxford, under which the museum falls, which is now the legal owner of the remains.

"Our first step was to lay the truth on the ground and go back to our Naga people and ask them what they felt about this," says Kikon. Most Nagas, they found, had no idea about this. Reverend Ellen Jamir, a Dimapur-based professor and a psychotherapist, now part of the initiative, says she was "surprised" when she was going through the excel-sheet of the places the human remains were sourced from. "I saw a familiar name...Wakching...it was the village I was born in, and that is when it hit me. These are remains of my ancestors...my blood..."