A Bid to Undo a Colonial-Era Wrong Touches a People’s Old Wounds

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Asia Pacific|A Bid to Undo a Colonial-Era Wrong Touches a People’s Old Wounds

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/world/asia/india-naga-repatriation-remains-museum.html

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An Oxford museum’s collection of objects taken from the Naga people includes human remains. What to do with them now is not a simple matter.

Aug. 2, 2025, 12:01 a.m. ET

First it was the British. Then the Christian missionaries. Then the Indian state they had never asked to be a part of.

For centuries, the Indigenous Naga people of the Indian subcontinent have struggled to preserve their culture against external forces.

Now, Nagas are trying to reclaim a part of that lost history, but the process has been anything but straightforward.

Their efforts to repatriate ancestral remains, which have been in a British museum for more than a century, have been “a trigger for the Nagas,” said Dolly Kikon, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who is Naga herself.

Naga society has changed immensely since those remains were taken. To contemplate their return means reckoning with those changes, and with how many of them are the result of external forces and violence.

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Dolly Kikon, a Naga scholar who was part of the delegation, found charms and an amulet from her own Lotha Naga community on display at the museum.Credit...Mary Turner for The New York Times

The map highlights the east Indian state of Nagaland, as well as the city of Dimapur, and the village of Longleng within the state.