Bring Our Ancestors Home: What Britain Owes the Naga People

In the Naga hills, the dead are not simply gone. For many Naga communities, ancestors remain part of the moral and spiritual order of the village, tied to the land, to the clan and to the household. A skull is not a curiosity. It is a person, a lineage and a responsibility. Yet today, thousands of kilometres from the villages of Nagaland and Myanmar's Naga Self-Administered Zone, Naga human remains sit in the storerooms and display cases of British institutions, catalogued as specimens and acquired as the spoils of an empire that believed it had the right to take whatever it wished.

The demand is simple and long overdue: return the skulls, and return the ancestors.

How the remains reached Britain

The story begins with the British push into the Naga Hills in the nineteenth century. The Nagas were never a single kingdom but a mosaic of self-governing villages, each fiercely independent, speaking dozens of distinct languages. The British, drawn to Assam by tea and trade, first treated the hills as a frontier to be contained. By the 1830s, military expeditions were entering Naga country. By 1866, a Naga Hills district was established, and after the fall of Khonoma in 1879 and the killing of the political officer G.H. Damant, the colonial administration tightened its grip. Kohima became the district headquarters, and the hills were drawn into a system of taxation, forced labour and punitive "expeditions."

These expeditions were not neutral explorations. They were armed incursions, and villages that resisted were burned. In this atmosphere of conquest, Naga material culture became something to be harvested. Officers, administrators, missionaries and anthropologists, men like J.H. Hutton and J.P. Mills, who served in the Naga Hills and wrote the standard colonial ethnographies, collected objects, photographs and, in some cases, human remains. Many of these collections ended up at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, which holds one of the largest Naga collections outside South Asia and, by its own acknowledgement, human remains from the region.

Colonial collecting depended on a basic inequality. The collectors held power over the communities they collected from. Even when objects were "given" or "sold," the question of consent cannot be separated from the fact of occupation. When it comes to human remains, the question becomes starker still. Skulls taken from graves, from village morungs (the communal men's houses) or from sacred sites were not offered freely. They were taken by people who had the guns, the administration and the courts on their side.

Understanding the skull

Any honest article on this subject has to address headhunting, because it is the lens through which the British, and much of the world, have preferred to see the Nagas. Colonial writers fixated on it, and the label "headhunters" became a convenient shorthand that justified conquest as a civilising mission.

The reality is more complex. Headhunting existed in many Naga communities as part of a wider system of warfare, status, ritual and cosmology. Skulls displayed in a morung or on a house could mark victory, fertility, protection or the bonds between the living and the dead. That world was never static, and it has long since changed. Nagaland today is overwhelmingly Christian, and headhunting ended generations ago. Naga people are not asking for the return of skulls out of nostalgia for a vanished practice. They are asking because these remains belong to families, clans and communities who have the right to decide what happens to their dead.

It is also worth saying plainly that the existence of headhunting does not justify the removal of remains by outsiders. Britain did not collect skulls out of respect for Naga custom. It collected them as proof of a theory, that peoples like the Nagas were "primitive," and that European science had the right to measure, classify and display them. Nineteenth-century craniology, which ranked human beings by the shape of their skulls, was a pillar of the racial pseudo-science that supported empire. Naga skulls were data points in that project.

What Britain owes

The debt Britain owes the Nagas is not only about skulls, but the skulls are the clearest place to start. There are at least five strands to it.

First, restitution of the dead. Human remains taken without free consent should be returned. This principle has already been accepted in many settings. Museums and governments have returned Māori toi moko to New Zealand, Aboriginal ancestral remains to Australia, and the remains of Indigenous peoples to communities across North America and elsewhere. Britain has the legal and moral tools to act; what it lacks is consistent will. Where legislation such as the Human Tissue Act 2004 limits some institutions, that is a reason to reform the law, not a reason for delay.

Second, honesty about provenance. Britain must open its archives. Museums should publish full inventories of Naga human remains, with their collectors, dates and the circumstances of acquisition as far as they are known. Naga communities cannot claim what they are not allowed to see.

Third, community control of the process. Return must not be negotiated over the heads of Naga people. It should be led by Naga communities themselves, through their own institutions, elders, church bodies and village councils, and not routed solely through national governments. The Nagas are a people divided by an international border between India and Myanmar and by a long, unresolved political conflict. Any process must respect their right to decide who speaks for them.

Fourth, acknowledgement of colonial violence. A return of remains without an acknowledgement of the violence that enabled their removal would be hollow. Britain's conquest of the Naga Hills involved military force, forced labour and the destruction of villages. It also laid the groundwork for a political tragedy: in 1947 the British left South Asia without resolving the status of the Naga Hills. The Naga National Council declared independence on 14 August 1947, a day before India's own, and had already told the Simon Commission in 1929 that the Nagas wished to be left to determine their own future. The decades of conflict, militarisation and suffering that followed cannot be laid entirely at Britain's door, but Britain's decision to fold the Naga Hills into its Indian administration and then depart, ignoring Naga appeals, is part of the story.

Fifth, support for Naga heritage on Naga terms. Return should be accompanied by resources, not as charity but as repair. That could mean funding for community museums, cultural centres, language documentation, and Naga-led research into the collections held abroad. It could also mean opening the Pitt Rivers and other collections to Naga scholars, artists and elders, so that knowledge held in storage can flow back to the people it came from.

The arguments against, and why they fail

Opponents of return usually make the same few arguments. They say that museums preserve and protect the objects. They say that returning remains sets a precedent that would "empty the museums." They say that the chain of ownership is too old and too tangled to untangle.

None of these survives scrutiny. Preservation is not ownership, and no one is entitled to hold a person's ancestors hostage in the name of conservation. The "empty the museums" argument is a scare tactic. Repatriation of human remains is a narrow category, and most museum collections would remain untouched. As for complexity, that is precisely why institutions should be doing the research and engaging with communities now, rather than hiding behind the difficulty.

There is also a quieter argument: that Naga communities no longer care, or that Christian converts would not want the remains back. This is a presumption that should be tested by asking, not assumed from a distance. Many Naga people have made clear in recent years that they want to know what is held abroad and want a say in its future. Whether a community chooses reburial, ceremony, or some other form of respectful care is its decision and no one else's.

A moral test for Britain

Britain likes to describe itself as a country that confronts its past honestly. Debates over museums, statues and street names have shown how uncomfortable that process can be. But the question of human remains is perhaps the clearest test of all, because there is no ambiguity about what is at stake. These were people. They were taken from their own soil, in the context of conquest, and placed in an institution that treated them as objects of study.

The Naga call for the return of skulls is not an act of aggression. It is a request that the descendants of those who took them finally do the right thing. For the Nagas, bringing the dead home is not only about the past. It is about dignity in the present, and about a future in which Naga people are no longer defined by what outsiders collected from them, but by what they choose to remember, honour and rebuild.

The skulls in the cabinets are not Britain's to keep. They never were. The time has come to send them home.