Comes after Pitt Rivers Museum in England engaged in an “ethical review” of their permanent displays, with a bid to “decolonise” their collections
On September 14, 2020, the Pitt Rivers Museum in England’s Oxford made a landmark announcement. In a post-pandemic overhaul of its collection, the iconic museum — one of the best-known in the world for anthropology, ethnography and archaeology—would take its collection of “human remains” and other “insensitive” exhibits off display. These items, sourced during the expansion of the British Empire, played into stereotypical thinking about cultures across the globe as “savage” or “primitive”, said the museum’s director, Laura Van Broekhoven.
It was time for them to be removed, and possibly repatriated to their rightful homes.
In another continent, Naga researcher and anthropologist Dolly Kikon read the news with a sense of urgency. Hours later, Kikon, a Lotha Naga from Dimapur, and now a professor in the University of Melbourne, was drafting an email to Broekhoven. She cut to the chase: could the ancestral Naga human remains, displayed in the Pitt Rivers Museum for more than 100 years, be returned to her people back home?
The rest is likely to become history. Kikon’s request has spawned a community-led initiative among the Nagas to bring their ancestral remains home. It is the first such effort to repatriate ancestral human remains of an indigenous community in India, possibly even South Asia.
An ethical review
The Pitt Rivers Museum has a rich collection of 500,000 items acquired over more than 130 years of British imperialism. Part of it is the largest collection (at least 6,500 objects) of Naga material remains in the world. These include items of everyday life such as clothes, agricultural tools, archery and weapons, basketry, ceramics — and human ancestral remains (skulls and bones), majority of which were collected by two colonial administrators, John Henry Hutton and James Philip Mills in the early 1900s.
Since 2017, the museum has been engaged in an “ethical review” of their permanent displays, with a bid to “decolonise” their collections. The decision to take off human remains was part of this objective. For Kikon, the announcement hit home. As a tribal anthropologist, she says, it has always been “disturbing” to see Naga objects being displayed as “exotic and primitive” in museums across the world. “
For more than 100 years, museums across Europe have displayed Naga objects …They were taken away as souvenirs and artifacts under duress during colonial expeditions,” she says. That is what led her to reach out to Broekhoven in 2020, who wrote back in two days. The museum director, who also leads the “internal review of permanent displays from an ethical perspective”, says her “heart rejoiced” when Kikon reached out to her. “With the museum’s complicated colonial history, it was important for us not to shy away from difficult conversations,” said Broekhoven in an email to The Indian Express.
The museum is now actively reaching out to descendants of communities to find the most appropriate way to care for these complex items. In December 2020, Broekhoven made a trip to Nagaland to meet with the stakeholders. “A lot of people might think about the removal of certain objects as a loss, but what we are trying to show is that we aren’t losing anything but creating space for more expansive stories. That is at the heart of decolonisation,”she said.
Recover, restore and decolonise
Following the email, the museum reached out to the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR) — a collective which, since 2008, has been a key facilitator in the Indo-Naga peace process — to begin the conversation on repatriation. Now, the collective is the chief facilitator of the process. The FNR, in collaboration with Kikon and Arkotong Longkumer, another Naga anthropologist, based in Edinburgh, formed a Naga research team called “Recover Restore and Decolonise” (RRaD) in 2020.
In the past two years, the RRaD team comprising Nagas from all walks of life are conducting interviews, holding community-facing meetings, and generating public awareness about the initiative on a voluntary basis. It is only the first step before they build a case to make an official claim to the University of Oxford (under which the museum falls), which is now the legal owner of the remains, says Kikon. “Our first step was to lay the truth on the ground, and go back to our Naga people, and ask them what they felt about this,” she says. Most Nagas, they found, had no idea about this.
Reverend Ellen Jamir, a Dimapur-based professor and a psychotherapist, now part of the initiative, says she was “surprised”, when she was going through the excel-sheet of the places the human remains were sourced from. “I saw a familiar name…Wakching…it was the village I was born in, and that is when it hit me. These are remains of my ancestors…my blood…boxed up in a museum in some part of the world,” she says, “How were they taken away? Don’t they deserve a proper burial? Suddenly, I felt a huge sense of responsibility.” Jamir adds that repatriation is an “international, legal matter”, rife with bureaucratic hurdles and challenges.
Most successful repatriation efforts (such as of New Zealand’s Moriori and Australia’s Tasmanian Aboriginal people from the Natural History Museum, London to their native lands) have taken at least two decades. “But it is also a deeply spiritual process… especially for society like the Nagas. Today, we may be living in different parts of the world, in big cities and towns but as a society, we are deeply connected to our roots,” says the 47-year-old.
A time of reckoning
The Nagas have a complicated political history, often animated by violence and conflict. While Naga groups have been engaged in a peace process with the Indian government since 1997, the Naga struggle for self-determination is the longest running insurgency in India. In its heyday, the state witnessed brutal violence and heavy militarisation. The draconian Armed Forces Special Powers Act has overridden civil liberties in the Naga areas for decades now.
Longkumer, the Edinburgh-based anthropologist, says that while the repatriation process will take years to fructify, the RRaD has opened up “real conversations”. “The thread that runs through all of it is to heal, to reconcile, to take control of your own history,” he says.
The team has come up with a graphic novel, ‘A Path Home’, on Naga repatriation, to make this complex topic “as intelligible as possible” to everyday audiences, says Longkumer. It uses the example of ‘axone’, the fermented soyabean condiment, crucial to Naga cuisine, to explain decolonisation. The ingredient, because of its distinctive pungent smell, is often a sore point for Nagas living in big metros. But increasingly, axone is part of menus in cafes and fine-dining eateries outside of Nagaland — and this, Longkumer says, is “one kind of decolonisation”. “The point is to take ownership, to be proud of not only our food but the cultural systems that produce us…the same ones that have denigrated us for centuries as primitive or savage,” Longkumer says.
For 33-year-old Zavi-iNisa, also part of the initiative, it’s a “time of reckoning”. “Nagas are often thought of as primitive headhunters, consumers of dog meat…But every practice comes with cultural significance, and ethics. I am not saying it is right or wrong, but the significance of it is lost on most,” she says.
In the past few months, as she has been interviewing Nagas about the repatriation process, she has come across a diverse range of reactions: from anger to humiliation, from surprise to sadness, but rarely indifference. “After all, it is not just about bringing human bones from museums, it’s much more than that. It is about reconnecting with your identity, finding out who you are as a person, and re-telling your own story to the world, which has misrepresented you in so many ways,” she says.
This article was originally published in The Indian Express in April 2023. Full article here.