Oxford University's Pitt Rivers Museum has confirmed it will return the remains of 39 people taken from the Naga community in northeast India during Britain's colonial era. The museum, which holds the world's largest collection of Naga artefacts, said on Monday that it was preparing the repatriation after the university approved a restitution request submitted by the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR). The claim covered 40 sets of ancestral remains kept at the museum, submitted to Oxford University in February 2026. 

The University of Oxford's governing council agreed on July 13, 2026, to return 39 of the 40 remains, while declining to return the one additional set because its provenance as Naga could not be clearly established. Museum director Laura Van Broekhoven said the remains "have been away from their homeland for far too long," while describing her involvement in the years-long process as humbling. She had first reached out to the FNR in 2020 to help facilitate the repatriation. 

The Pitt Rivers Museum, regarded as one of the world's leading institutions for anthropology, ethnology and archaeology, holds more than 6,000 Naga artefacts in total. Most of these items, including the human remains, were collected by British colonial administrators in the early 20th century. According to the museum's own records, John Henry Hutton, an anthropologist and administrator in the Indian Civil Service, first donated Naga ancestral remains to the collection more than a century ago, with Hutton and a fellow administrator, James Philip Mills, bringing most of the remains to Oxford between roughly 1910 and 1940. 

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The Forum for Naga Reconciliation and other Naga organisations welcomed the agreement, stating in a message sent to AFP that repatriation "is not simply about bones and ancestral remains finding their way back to the land but importantly about memory returning to where it belongs." Some of the remains had been on public display at the museum until 2020, when the institution removed its collection of human remains from exhibition as part of a broader effort to decolonise its holdings. 

A date for a formal handover ceremony has not yet been set, though the museum says it is working closely with the Naga community to arrange one. The move forms part of a wider international push by Western institutions to return artefacts and human remains acquired during the colonial period, a movement that has also touched long-running disputes such as Greece's decades-old campaign for the return of the Parthenon Marbles from Britain. For the Naga community, whose homeland spans parts of present-day Nagaland and neighbouring states in northeast India, the agreement marks a significant step in a reconciliation process that campaigners say has been years in the making. 

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