Joel Rodrigues
It was 1881. Colonel Robert Woodthorpe working with the Survey of India was in London on leave. He had just returned from participating in several survey operations, military expeditions, and punitive actions across Northeast India. He had brought the skull of a Wangcho Naga woman from Nginu village with him. While in the British Empire’s capital city, he presented two papers on the Nagas at the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland.
The first paper presented in March 1881 has now become one of the most-widely read papers on the Nagas. After this presentation, ethnologist Augustus Henry Keane questioned Woodthorpe on the hair, complexion, eyes, nose, cheekbones, and most importantly, the typical shape of a Naga head. The question on the Naga head demanded technical details on its structure. Anatomist George Thane came forward to assist, but he needed “some Naga skulls” to place the Naga people into the existing racial data circulated in Europe.
The demand and fascination for Naga skulls predates Woodthorpe’s presentation and only increased with time. Therefore, Thane who had never visited the Northeastern frontiers of India, could easily locate five in London. Collector Joseph Barnard Davis had already acquired three by 1875 and sold it to the Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCSE) in 1880. A fourth Naga skull was brought to the college by a collector named F d’O Partridge. Thane accessed these four for his analysis. Woodthorpe lent the fifth one; the Naga skull he had extracted from Nginu.
To understand the magnitude of colonial violence inflicted on the Naga people, it is necessary to present the scant history available of these Naga skulls. John Berry White, regarded as a pioneer of modern medicine in Assam, shipped off two skulls to Joseph Barnard Davis before 1867. White failed to note their names, and Davis reduced them to numbers 773 and 774.
The first one belonged to a Naga man who was killed by British soldiers. There is no mention of his village or community except that he is described as a ‘freebooter,’ a term used for a bandit or plunderer. White severed his head and cleaned it in a process so perfect that it was deemed to be a fine specimen for analysis. The second skull belonged to a young Naga boy that White described as a ‘servant-lad of Colonel Hannay.’
The way these Naga skulls were taken without any funerary rituals is gruesome. A Naga servant lad was made to serve his colonial masters not just in life but even as bone after death. Whether as freebooter or servant, Naga bodies transported to London were conscripted for a strange afterlife where the British Empire turned these bodies into evidence and justification of its conquest.
The third Naga skull belonged to a man claimed to be murdered by his wife. His head was then severed from his body and shipped off to London. In due course, his lower jaw was lost. After acquisition, the Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCSE) renumbered these three from Davis’ collections as 793, 794, and 795, retaining fewer details.
The fourth addition to the RCSE collection was made in 1881. It was a decorated skull of a Wangcho Naga woman from Nginu village. This skull was clearly stolen just as Woodthorpe had stolen the one he lent to George Thane as a scientific resource.
From the Naga homelands to ships, laboratories, and onto lecture tables, Naga ancestral remains underwent a violent treatment. Names, memories, and relations, erased from clans, kins, and families, Naga skulls were deemed as specimens to aid colonial science and research in Europe.
Nothing prepares us to revisit the archives of colonial violence, but it is numbing to scan the details of the violence inflicted on Naga ancestors. Accounts of Naga ancestral remains in museums, laboratories, and personal collections seem to iterate colonial claims of the Nagas as savages, barbarians, and headhunters.
At the same, it conveniently erases the foundational violence that made the acquisition of Naga cultural heritage possible. On the one hand, the dominant trope that accompanies Naga heads across Europe is along the lines of headhunting practices of Naga ancestors. On the other hand, it fails to mention the British invasion of the Naga homelands as bloody and violent. Cartographers and surgeons entered these hills to survey along with military columns. When people resisted these intrusions, harsh punitive actions followed. Villages were burned, crops destroyed, bodies seized, and people killed. Colonial prose made all this appear as if the British were instilling order amongst the wild Naga people.
In this process, funerals were denied and funerary sites were desecrated to extract the dead. The two from Nginu village, provided by Partridge and Woodthorpe, were decorated female skulls adorned with rings, polished shells, and bells. By then, colonial officers knew that they were ancestors from the literature circulating around. Yet, they were extracted from their resting places. These votive embellishments were removed during the scientific measurements but placed back later, akin to stripping a person of their soul.
As racist sciences linking skulls to intelligence were debunked across the world, decorated skulls became more valuable as collectibles. Many of these were taken from the Naga homelands in full knowledge as acts of desecration. Their right to rest disrupted. Therefore, a Naga skull in a museum or university drawer is not merely a remnant of obsolete science.
For the Naga people, in their plea for repatriation of these ancestors, there is a call for healing, reconciliation, and unity. In this appeal to heal also lies the refusal for them to remain a collector item, be it in the sciences where they are studied without consent or converted into data. Therefore, Naga repatriation is not merely about return. Repatriation cuts deeper. It contests colonial science and violence that dehumanised Naga bodies.
Naga scholars, activists, leaders, and elders part of the Recover, Restore and Decolonise (RRaD) connect research to community voices on justice and healing. Repatriation is not an easy task but an essential practice of repair. Better labels in museums are not enough. A more sensitive database is inadequate. The wider question is whether museums have the right to keep Indigenous belongings in perpetuity, especially those taken under duress. These are conversations that Naga descendants and all Indigenous communities will continue to address.
The Naga ancestor who became a specimen cannot be returned to the moment before extraction. That wound will not be undone by returning to the Naga homeland. But repatriation can refuse the colonial erasure and lies that transformed the Nagas into specimens. Repatriation of Naga ancestors can mean their return to relation, land, memory, and care.
Colonel Robert Woodthorpe’s collection was bequeathed to the Pitt Rivers Museum after his death in 1898. In 2019 the museum created a case display of this collection. The Naga ancestral skull that he had taken from Nginu was not in this exhibition. Perhaps, it is waiting elsewhere to return to the land from where she was taken away. Or perhaps, it is kept in an undisclosed location to be sold in an auction somewhere in Europe.
Joel Rodrigues is a PhD student in the Department of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University.
.jpg)
