Naga skulls: Indian tribes seeks to bring home ancestral remains from UK museums

Last month, Ellen Konyak was shocked to find {that a} Nineteenth-Century cranium from the north-eastern Indian state of Nagaland was up for public sale within the UK.

The horned cranium of a Naga tribesman was amongst 1000’s of things that European colonial directors had collected from the state.

Konyak, a member of the Naga Forum for Reconciliation (NFR) which is making efforts to convey these human stays again dwelling, says the information of the public sale disturbed her.

“To see that people are still auctioning our ancestral human remains in the 21st Century was shocking,” she stated. “It was very insensitive and deeply hurtful.”

The Swan at Tetsworth, the UK-based vintage centre that put the cranium on public sale, marketed it as a part of their “Curious Collector Sale”, valued between £3,500 ($4,490) and £4,000 ($5,132). Alongside the cranium – which is from a Belgian assortment – the sale listed shrunken heads from the Jivaro people of South America and skulls from the Ekoi folks of West Africa.

Naga scholars and experts protested in opposition to the sale. The chief minister of Nagaland, Konyak’s dwelling state, wrote a letter to the Indian overseas ministry describing the act as “dehumanising” and “continued colonial violence upon our people”.

The public sale home withdrew the sale following the outcry, however for the Naga folks the episode revived reminiscences of their violent previous, prompting them to resume requires the repatriation of their ancestral stays saved or displayed removed from their homeland.

Scholars recommend that a few of these human stays had been bartered objects or presents, however others could have been taken away with out the consent of their house owners.

Alok Kumar Kanungo, a scholar of Naga tradition, estimates that the UK’s public museums and personal collections alone maintain round 50,000 Naga objects.

Oxford University’s Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM), which has the most important Naga assortment, options roughly 6,550 objects taken from the state, together with 41 human stays. The museum additionally has human remains from several other states of British India.

But in recent times, consultants say, with rising moral issues about assortment, sale and show of human stays, many collectors are reconsidering their strategy.

Kanungo says human stays have change into “white elephants” for museums.

“They are no longer an object that can be disposed of or possessed by its owners; no longer a source of tourists’ money; can no longer be used to present Naga peoples as ‘uncivilised’; and of late have become an emotionally and politically charged issue.”

So, museums have started returning 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, PRM told the BBC that it had returned 22 such objects.

A museum spoksperson told the BBC that the figure has now gone up to 35. “So far these [objects] have all been returned to Australia, New Zealand, US and Canada.”

As a part of an moral evaluation, the museum eliminated Naga skulls from public show in 2020 and positioned them in storage. This is when FNR demanded their repatriation for the primary time.

The museum said it was yet to receive a formal claim from Naga descendants and the processes to return human remains “can take between 18 months and several other years, relying on the complexity of the case”.

Repatriating human remains is more complicated than returning artefacts. It requires extensive research to determine whether the items were collected ethically, to identify descendants and to navigate complex international regulations on 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 returns.

“It is a bit like detective work,” Longkumer said. “We have to sift through different layers of information and try to read between the lines to actually find out about the exact nature of the collections and where they are from.”

But for the Naga people, this process is not merely logistical. “We are dealing with human remains,” said Konyak. “It’s an international and legal process, but it’s also a spiritual one for us.”

The group has been travelling to villages, meeting Naga elders, organising lectures and distributing educational materials such as comic books and videos to spread awareness.

They are also trying to build consensus around subjects 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.

The group found that even Naga elders were unaware that their ancestral remains were in foreign land. Anthropologist and archaeologist Tiatoshi Jamir said one elder told him that this could make “the soul of their ancestors restless”.

Jamir said even he was not aware about the skulls on display in foreign museums until he read about them in a local paper in the early 2000s.

The British took over the Naga areas in 1832 and, in 1873, introduced a special permission for travellers – called the Inner Line Permit – to strictly control access to the region.

Historians say the colonial directors put down any rebellions and sometimes burnt Naga villages to subdue them, within the course of erasing much of their important cultural markers resembling work, engravings and artefacts.

Konyak says she has discovered that one of the human remains in PRM’s list is of a person from her village and tribe.

“I am like, ‘Oh my goodness! It belongs to one of my ancestors’,” she told the BBC.

She is still undecided about how the last rites would be performed once the remains are returned.

“But we want them back as a mark of respect to our elders,” she stated. “To reclaim our history. To claim our narrative.”

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