Indian tribes want to bring ancestral remains from UK museums

Last month, Ellen Konyak was shocked to learn that a 19th-century skull from India's northeastern Nagaland region was to be auctioned in the UK.

The horned skull of the Naga tribe was among the thousands of objects that European colonial administrators had collected from the government.

Konyak, a member of the Naga Forum for Reconciliation (NFR) which is making efforts to bring these bodies back home, says the news of the auction has disturbed him.

“Seeing that people are still selling the bodies of our ancestors in the 21st century was shocking,” she said. “It was insensitive and very hurtful.”

The Swan in Tetsworth, the UK-based antiques center that put the skull up for auction, advertised it as part of its “Curious Collectors Sale”, with an estimate of between £3,500 ($4,490) and £4,000 ($5,132). Next to the skull – from the Belgian collection – The sale is listed on the Jivaro heads of South America and skulls from the Ekoi people of West Africa.

Naga scholars and experts protested against the sale. The chief minister of Nagaland, Konyak's home state, wrote a letter to India's Ministry of External Affairs describing the act as “dehumanizing” and “continuing colonial violence against our people”.

House for sale canceled the sale following an outcrybut for the Naga people the episode revived their memories of violence, prompting them to renew calls for the remains of their ancestors to be brought home and preserved or displayed far from their homeland.

Scholars suggest that some of these remains were property or gifts, but others may have been taken without the consent of their owners.

Alok Kumar Kanungo, an expert on Naga culture, estimates that the UK's public museums and private collections alone hold around 50,000 Naga objects.

Oxford University's Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM), which has the largest collection of Nagas, includes about 6,550 objects taken from the state, including 41 human remains. The museum also has it human remains from several other provinces of British India.

But in recent years, experts say, with growing ethical concerns about the collection, sale and display of human remains, many collectors are rethinking their approach.

Kanungo says human remains have become “white elephants” in museums.

“They are no longer something that can be disposed of or managed by their owners; no more tourist fees; it can no longer be used to present the Nagas as 'uncivilized'; and more recently they have become emotional and political. the issue is set.”

Therefore, museums have begun to return human remains from communities such as the Maori tribes of New Zealand, the Mudan warriors of Taiwan, the Aboriginal people of Australia and the Native Hawaiians.

In 2019, the PRM told the BBC it had returned 22 such items.

A spokesman for the museum told the BBC that the number had risen to 35. “So far these are [objects] all returned to Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada.”

As part of the ethical review, the museum removed the Naga skulls from public display in 2020 and placed them in storage. This is the time The FNR demanded that they be sent back home first of all.

The museum said it is yet to receive a formal claim from the Naga descendants and the process to return the human remains “could take between 18 months and several years, depending on the complexity of the case”.

Repatriating human remains is more complicated than repatriating artifacts. It requires extensive research to determine whether items were collected ethically, to identify descendants and to navigate complex international laws regarding the movement of human remains.

The Naga forum has formed a group called Recover, Restore and Decolonise under anthropologists Dolly Kikon and Arkotong Longkumer to facilitate restoration.

“It's like detective work,” Longkumer said. “We have to sift through different layers of information and try to read between the lines to really find the exact nature of the clusters and where they come from.”

But for the Naga people, this process does not just work. “We are dealing with human remains,” said Konyak. “It's an international system and law, but it's also spiritual for us.”

The group has been visiting villages, meeting Naga elders, organizing talks and distributing educational materials such as comic books and videos to spread awareness.

They are also trying to build consensus on subjects such as disposal practices for repatriated remains. Most of the Nagas now follow Christianity, but their ancestors were followers of living beings who followed different birth and death rituals.

The group discovered that even the Naga elders did not know that the remains of their ancestors were in another country. Anthropologist and archaeologist Tiatoshi Jamir said an elder told him that this would make “the soul of their ancestors restless”.

Jamir said he didn't even know about the skull being displayed in international museums until he read about it in a local paper in the early 2000s.

The British took over Naga lands in 1832 and, in 1873, introduced a special traveler's permit – called the Inner Line Permit – to strictly control access to the region.

Historians say that the colonial rulers put down any rebellion and often burned Naga villages to subdue them, during that time. erasing many of their important cultural symbols such as paintings, drawings and artefacts.

Konyak says he discovered that one of the human remains on the PRM list belonged to a person from his village and tribe.

“I would say, 'Oh my God! It is one of the mine ancestors,” he told the BBC.

He still hasn't decided how the last rites will be performed once the remains are returned.

“But we want them to come back as a sign of respect for our elders,” he said. “To bring back our history. To find our narrative.”

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