Repakaba Tzudir
Ph D Scholar, Department of Sociology, Nagaland University
I have hesitated for a long time before writing about the repatriation of Naga ancestral remains.
Not because I have nothing to say, but perhaps because I have had too much respect for those who began the conversation before many of us had even noticed it. I have followed the discussion around the Naga ancestral remains at the Pitt Rivers Museum, particularly through the Morung Lecture series, from its early public conversations. For much of this time, I chose to remain silent. I wanted to listen, read, observe the arguments and understand where the conversation was heading. Now, with the University of Oxford having formally agreed to return 39 Naga ancestral human remains, I feel that perhaps remaining silent is no longer enough.
I write this not as a member of RRaD, nor as someone directly involved in the repatriation process. I write simply as a young scholar from Nagaland and as a Naga citizen who has been watching this journey unfold. I do not claim to have the final word on the matter. In fact, I am writing because I believe there should be many voices. I welcome the return of our ancestors.
I also deeply appreciate the work of Prof. Dolly Kikon, Prof. Arkotong Longkumer, the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR), the RRaD team, Naga elders, tribal representatives and the many others who have kept this difficult conversation alive. The Pitt Rivers Museum records that the process began in 2020 and developed through dialogue with the FNR, RRaD, tribal Hohos, elders, churches and communities. In 2021, RRaD was formed to undertake participatory research and facilitate community engagement.
For that reason, I do not see this as a matter that began and ended in an academic room. It has gradually entered our public conversation. And perhaps that is one of the most important things about this journey.
A conversation that has not been without questions
What I appreciate most about the repatriation discussion is that it has not been entirely one-directional.
There have been questions.
There have been disagreements.
There have been moments of discomfort.
And I think that is healthy.
Dr Salome Zhimomi, for instance, welcomed repatriation but raised an important question about community ownership. Who initiated the process? Were traditional institutions and tribal bodies sufficiently involved at the beginning? Can academics initiate a process concerning community heritage and subsequently become its principal interpreters? Her concern was not simply about whether the remains should return, but about who gets to speak and decide in the name of the Naga community.
Dr Asangba Tzudir raised another set of questions. He acknowledged the significance of repatriation but asked what should happen once the remains return. Should they be buried? Preserved? How do we retain the historical knowledge associated with them? He also raised the difficult question of how the colonial history being discussed relates to the much more recent histories of militarisation, conflict and violence experienced by Nagas. His argument was not that these questions should stop repatriation, but that the process needed dialogue, historical consciousness and a pragmatic understanding of what "decolonisation" should mean in the Naga context.
More recently, Dr. Michael. T. Heniese has raised another important anthropological question. He welcomes the return and takes seriously the feelings of Naga elders and representatives, but asks us to examine the genealogy of the grievance itself: how did the return of ancestral remains become articulated as a significant collective Naga concern at this particular historical moment? He also cautions against allowing the language of colonial trauma and healing to overshadow the long history of post-1947 militarisation and state violence experienced by Naga communities.
And then there is the recent intervention by Joel Rodrigues, whose archival work takes us in another direction. His account of Naga skulls collected by colonial officers such as Robert Woodthorpe, and of the ways human remains entered scientific and museum collections, reminds us that behind the contemporary debate are individual human beings whose names, relationships and funerary contexts were often reduced to numbers and specimens.
I do not see these voices as cancelling one another. I see them as a conversation.
One asks, who speaks for the community? Another asks, what happens when the remains come home? Another asks, how did this grievance become a collective concern? Another reminds us, what actually happened to these bodies in the first place?
Perhaps all four questions are necessary.
Listening has been part of the process
This is also why I have some difficulty with the suggestion that the repatriation conversation has simply been imposed upon Naga society by a handful of academics.
There is certainly room to question representation. There should be. But we should also acknowledge the amount of conversation that has taken place since this process began.
The Morung Lecture XIV, Naga Ancestral Remains, Repatriation and Healing of the Land, opened the public conversation in July 2022. It was followed by Morung Lecture XV, Journey from the Heart: Naga Repatriation and Healing of the Land, and later Morung Lecture XVIII, A Conversation on Repatriation: Histories of Loss and Renewal of Hope. The conversation returned again in Morung Lecture XXII in 2025, Healing and Wholeness through Repatriation: A Naga Perspective. These were not simply occasions for presenting a settled position; they created spaces where questions, reflections and disagreements could be aired publicly. And the conversation did not remain confined to Dimapur or Kohima.
RRaD's own record shows engagements with communities and institutions in different parts of the Naga homeland. There were consultations in Mon, including an engagement with the Konyak Union; dialogue with the Lotha Hoho; a public dialogue at Jubilee Memorial College in Mokokchung; and later engagements with Sumi frontal organisations in Zunheboto. There were also wider public and educational conversations, including the Indigenous Heritage & Decolonization: The Naga Repatriation Journey programme.
What strikes me about this is not simply the number of meetings. It is the attempt to take the conversation to people.
The process has also tried to communicate beyond academic circles. RRaD has produced public videos, media materials, interviews, visual stories and educational material in English and in forms intended to reach Naga audiences more widely. The A Path Home graphic novel by Arkotong Longkumer and Meren Imchen is one such example: an attempt to tell the story of repatriation through a form that is accessible beyond scholarly writing. RRaD has also held media-orientation programmes and public discussions intended to help journalists understand the history and complexities of repatriation.
Perhaps even more telling is the effort to move the conversation beyond English. The FNR's public statement on repatriation has been translated into numerous Naga languages, including Angami, Ao, Chakhesang, Chang, Konyak, Lotha, Phom, Rengma, Sümi, Tangkhul, Yimkhiung, Zeme and several others.
For me, this matters.
If the intention were simply to make a claim on behalf of the Nagas without the Nagas, there would be little reason to undertake the slow and sometimes difficult work of translating, travelling, explaining, listening and returning to the conversation. Indeed, FNR's own 2023 statement described its role as that of a facilitator, saying that the future status and care of the remains would ultimately depend on the Naga people. It also explicitly invited suggestions and constructive criticism.
This does not mean that every question about representation has been resolved. Nor should we stop asking those questions. But it does mean that the process deserves to be judged also by the spaces it has created for people to question, disagree, learn and participate. And perhaps that is one of the more important things that has emerged from this journey. We have begun talking to one another about our ancestors. The conversation did not end there.
Why am I writing now?
Perhaps because I have realised something about myself.
During my own PhD years, I began to understand colonialism in a way I had not understood it before. Growing up in Nagaland, I knew about the British invasion. I knew about the wars. I knew the broad outlines of our political history. But for a long time, colonialism existed in my mind largely as a historical event: something that happened when the British entered the Naga Hills. It was only through research and reading that I began to see how much deeper its effects could be. Colonialism did not only redraw territories or bring military expeditions into the hills. It also affected how people were classified, studied, represented and spoken about.
It entered our histories.
It entered our institutions.
It entered the ways in which our culture was described.
And, sometimes, it entered the ways in which we came to understand ourselves.This realisation has made me increasingly concerned about what my generation will remember.
We are living at a time when our connection with many aspects of our cultural past is becoming increasingly distant. Practices that were once part of everyday life are becoming memories. Oral histories disappear with elders. Languages weaken. Traditional knowledge is sometimes reduced to performances for festivals. And history, unless actively remembered, has a tendency to become a collection of convenient fragments.
This is why I think the repatriation conversation matters even to those who may never have seen a Naga ancestral skull in a museum.
It has opened a door. A door through which many young Nagas can begin asking:
Who were our ancestors?
How were they represented?
What did colonial administrators write about us?
What did they leave out?
What happened to our material culture?
How did our communities change?
What did Christianity transform?
What did colonialism change?
What did postcolonial militarisation change?
And what have we ourselves forgotten?
These questions are larger than the 39 ancestors returning from Oxford.
From 39 remains to 39 ancestors
There is one small but important shift in language that I hope we can make as this journey moves forward. We have often heard the number 39 in recent discussions, the 39 ancestral human remains that Oxford has agreed to return. But perhaps, as the process moves from claim to homecoming, we should gradually move from speaking of “39 remains” to “39 ancestors.”
The difference may seem small, but language matters.“Remains” describes what is physically left of a human being. “Ancestor” reminds us that there was once a person there: someone who had a name, a family, a village, relationships, memories and a place in a living community. It moves us away from the language of the museum catalogue and closer to the language of relationship.
I do not mean that we should invent stories about people whose identities we do not know. Rather, we should resist allowing the museum vocabulary to become the only vocabulary through which we encounter them. They were not 39 specimens waiting to be transferred from one institution to another. They were 39 human lives, and for many of us, 39 ancestors whose interrupted journey home has now become part of our own history.
Perhaps this is also part of what healing asks of us: not merely to bring them back, but to learn to see them again as human beings.
Why "healing"?
I have also spent considerable time thinking about this word: healing.
At first, I wondered why repatriation had to be described in such language. But I have come to understand it somewhat differently. Healing does not have to mean forgetting. It does not mean that once the remains come home, the wounds of history disappear. Nor should healing mean cultivating hatred toward those who came before us, whether British colonial officials or anyone else. For me, healing means something much simpler and perhaps more difficult: being able to look at the past without being imprisoned by it.
We need to know what happened.
We need to name what was unjust.
We need to acknowledge what was taken.
But we also need to live with that history without allowing it to dictate hatred or revenge. To reconcile with the past is not to excuse it. To remember colonial violence is not to create another enemy. And to understand our ancestors is not necessarily to romanticise everything they did. Perhaps healing means learning to carry difficult histories without allowing those histories to destroy our capacity to imagine a future.
That is why I find the Naga-Oxford Declaration significant. In June 2025, representatives of Naga Tribe Hohos and FNR expressed a collective commitment to bring the ancestors home and described the process as one of "healing and wholeness," while also calling for a dignified resting place and a shared memorial. Now, with Oxford's July 2026 decision to return 39 ancestral remains, that conversation has entered a new stage.
We should not be afraid of disagreement
I think we should resist the temptation to divide the conversation into those who are "for" repatriation and those who are "against" it. The debate is much richer than that.
A person can support repatriation and still question how the process is organised.
A person can believe the ancestors should return and still ask whether burial or preservation is appropriate.
A person can recognise colonial violence and still ask why the history of post-1947 state violence receives less attention.
A person can appreciate RRaD and still ask whether more village-level voices need to be heard.
A person can welcome the ancestors home without believing that returning them will somehow make our history whole again.
These are not contradictions that we necessarily need to eliminate. They are questions that we need to carry together. And perhaps this is where the work of Prof. Dolly Kikon and Prof. Arkotong Longkumer deserves particular acknowledgement from me.
I appreciate them not because I agree with every possible interpretation of the project, but because they were attentive enough to open a conversation that many of us might otherwise never have entered. Their work, along with FNR, RRaD, elders, tribal representatives and others involved, has given us something that cannot easily be measured: a new reason for young Nagas to ask questions about our own history. That is no small contribution.
We cannot remain spectators
I have remained silent for long enough. Perhaps many of us have. We watch scholars speak. We read newspaper reports. We attend lectures. We share photographs. We express our emotions when important announcements are made. But eventually, we must also enter the conversation. Not because we have all the answers. Precisely because we do not.
The return of the ancestors should not become the final chapter of this story. It should perhaps become the beginning of a much larger Naga engagement with our history.If our ancestors are coming home, perhaps we should also begin going home intellectually, to our histories, our oral traditions, our village memories, our languages, our customary institutions and the difficult questions that we have sometimes avoided.
The Oxford decision concerns 39 human remains. But what comes home with them may be much larger than 39 ancestors.
Perhaps it is a responsibility.
A responsibility to remember.
A responsibility to question.
A responsibility to research.
A responsibility to listen to our elders before their memories disappear.
And a responsibility to ensure that our children do not inherit only fragments of a history that we ourselves were unwilling to examine.
I welcome our ancestor’s home.
But I hope that their homecoming will not close the conversation. I hope it opens one. Because perhaps the real work of repatriation begins not when the ancestors arrive in Nagaland, but when we, the living, begin asking what kind of relationship we want to have with the history they have carried for us.
