The University of Oxford has approved the return of the remains of 39 people from the Naga community in northeast India, who were taken during the period of British colonial rule.

The Pitt Rivers Museum is now preparing to repatriate the ancestral remains following a restitution request submitted by the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR) and other Naga organisations. “The remains have been away from their homeland for far too long,” museum director Laura Van Broekhoven said in a statement to CBS News.

For the Naga community, however, the return represents more than the recovery of human remains. The FNR and other organisations said repatriation is also about restoring cultural memory and reconnecting ancestors with their homeland.

The museum said the original request covered 40 sets of human remains. Oxford approved the return of 39 in July, while one set was excluded because there was insufficient evidence to establish a clear Naga provenance.

Arrangements for the repatriation are now under way. The museum said it is working with representatives of the Naga community to determine a date for an official handover ceremony. No date has yet been announced.

Transporting ancestral remains internationally requires special permissions and specialist shipping arrangements. According to the museum, organising these requirements is expected to take at least two months.

The handover ceremony will take place at the Pitt Rivers Museum, after which a Naga delegation will accompany the remains on their journey home.

The museum holds more than 6,000 objects connected to the Naga community, with almost 700 currently displayed, according to its website. For Naga researchers and representatives, however, recovering these objects is a separate and considerably more complicated issue.

Dr Ellen Konyak Jamir, an FNR member and coordinator of Recover Restore and Decolonise, a research project led by two Naga academics, told MorungExpress that the return of artefacts involves a complex process and is not currently the group’s main priority.

The Pitt Rivers Museum has previously faced criticism over the way it displayed human remains and objects associated with Indigenous and colonised communities. Its collection once included shrunken heads, trophy heads and other human remains.

In 2020, the museum removed the displays as part of a broader effort to reconsider and decolonise its collections. At the time, Van Broekhoven said audience research had found that visitors frequently interpreted displays of human remains through stereotypes portraying other cultures as “savage”, “primitive” or “gruesome”.

The museum subsequently decided to remove 120 human remains from display, including tsantsas, Naga trophy heads and an Egyptian child mummy.

The Oxford decision is part of a growing international movement calling for Western museums and universities to return human remains and cultural objects acquired during the colonial period.

Earlier this year, the University of Edinburgh returned the skulls of six people to the Muscogee Nation in the United States. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation, based in present-day Oklahoma, is one of the largest federally recognised tribal nations in the US.

In 2022, London’s Horniman Museum returned 72 objects to Nigeria, including 12 Benin bronzes. Greece, meanwhile, has for decades sought the return of the Parthenon Marbles from Britain, arguing that they were removed from the Acropolis in the early 19th century by Lord Elgin while he was Britain’s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire.

Britain has maintained that the marbles were legally acquired, while successive governments have argued that the decision over their return ultimately rests with the British Museum, which currently holds them.