Alok Kumar Kanungo
Naga human remains, including skulls, were removed from India by European colonial administrators.
Last month, Ellen Konyak was shocked to discover that a 19th-century skull from India's northeastern state of Nagaland was up for auction in the United Kingdom.
The horned skull of a Naga tribesman was among thousands of objects that European colonial administrators collected from the state.
Konyak, a member of the Naga Forum for Reconciliation (NFR) which is working to bring these human remains home, says the news of the auction disturbed her.
“To see people still auctioning off our ancestral human remains in the 21st century was shocking,” she said. “It was very insensitive and deeply hurtful.”
The Swan at Tetsworth, the UK-based antiques center which put the skull up for auction, announced it as part of its 'Curious Collector Sale', worth between £3,500 ($4,490 $) and £4,000 ($5,132). Alongside the skull, from a Belgian collection, the sale featured reduced heads of the Jivaro people of South America and skulls of the Ekoi people of West Africa.
Naga scholars and experts protested the sale. The chief minister of Nagaland, Konyak's home state, wrote a letter to India's foreign ministry calling the act “dehumanizing” and “continuing colonial violence against our people.”
The auction house withdrew the sale following outcry, but for the Nagas the episode revived memories of their violent past, prompting them to renew calls for the repatriation of their ancestral remains stored or displayed far from their homeland .
Researchers suggest that some of these human remains were exchanged items or gifts, but others may have been taken without the consent of their owners.
Alok Kumar Kanungo
Naga human remains were on display at the Pitt Rivers Museum in the United Kingdom before being dismantled in 2020.
Alok Kumar Kanungo, an expert on Naga culture, estimates that public museums and private collections in the UK alone hold around 50,000 Naga objects.
The Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) at Oxford University, which has the largest Naga collection, displays around 6,550 objects from the state, including 41 human remains. The museum also has human remains from several other states of British India.
But in recent years, experts say, amid growing ethical concerns about collecting, selling and displaying human remains, many collectors are reconsidering their approach.
Kanungo says human remains have become “white elephants” for museums.
“They are no longer objects that their owners can get rid of or possess; they are no longer a source of money for tourists; they can no longer be used to portray Naga people as “uncivilized”; and have recently become an emotional and political element. problem charged.
So museums began returning human remains from communities such as the Maori tribes of New Zealand, the Mudan warriors of Taiwan, the Aborigines of Australia, and the Native Hawaiians.
In 2019, PRM told the BBC it had returned 22 of these items.
A museum spokesperson told the BBC that this figure has now risen to 35. “So far these (objects) have all been returned to Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Canada.” .
Arkotong Longkumer and Meren Imchen
Graphic novel discusses ancestral remains of the Naga people on display in far-flung museums
As part of an ethical review, the museum removed the Naga skulls from public display in 2020 and stored them. It was then that the FNR demanded their repatriation for the first time.
The museum said it had not yet received an official claim from Naga descendants and that processes to return human remains “can take between 18 months and several years, depending on the complexity of the case.”
The repatriation of human remains is more complicated than the return of objects. This requires extensive research to determine whether the objects were ethically collected, to identify descendants, and to understand the complex international regulations on the movement of human remains.
The Naga forum formed a group called Recover, Restore and Decolonize under the leadership of anthropologists Dolly Kikon and Arkotong Longkumer to facilitate returns.
“It’s a bit like detective work,” Longkumer said. “We need to sift through different layers of information and try to read between the lines to discover the exact nature of the collections and where they come from. »
But for the Naga people, this process is not just logistical. “We are dealing with human remains,” Konyak said. “It’s an international and legal process, but it’s also a spiritual process for us.”
The group visited villages, met Naga elders, held lectures and distributed educational materials such as comics and videos to raise awareness.
They are also trying to build consensus around issues such as the last rites of repatriated remains. Most Nagas now follow Christianity, but their ancestors were animists who followed different birth and death rituals.
Pitt Rivers Museum
The Pitt Rivers Museum houses thousands of artifacts that belonged to members of the Naga tribe.
The group discovered that even the ancient Naga were unaware that their ancestral remains were in a foreign land. Anthropologist and archaeologist Tiatoshi Jamir said an elder told him it could make “their ancestors' souls restless.”
Jamir said he was not even aware of the skulls on display in foreign museums until he read about them in a local newspaper in the early 2000s.
The British took control of the Naga regions in 1832, and in 1873 introduced a special permit for travelers – called the Inner Line Permit – to strictly control access to the region.
Historians claim that colonial administrators suppressed any rebellion and often burned Naga villages into submission, erasing much of their important cultural markers such as paintings, carvings and artifacts.
Konyak says he discovered that one of the human remains on PRM's list is that of a person from his village and tribe.
“I’m like, ‘Oh my God! It belongs to one of my ancestors,” she told the BBC.
She is still undecided on how the last rites will be performed once the remains are returned.
“But we want them back as a sign of respect to our elders,” she said. “To reclaim our history. To claim our story.
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