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Nagaland ignited in outrage earlier this week when a 19th-century horned Naga skull was put up for auction at The Swan in Tetsworth, England. With a valuation between £3,500 and £4,500, this listing struck a nerve with the public. Nagaland Chief Minister Neiphiu Rio urged the Ministry of External Affairs to intervene with the Indian High Commission in the UK, amplifying the Naga community’s long-standing efforts to repatriate ancestral remains from various museums in England and reclaim their history. “We urge the Government of India to do everything possible to ensure that the rights and emotions of our people are protected,” he wrote in his letter.
The Naga Hills, as perceived by the British, extended westward from the Patkai ranges, bordering the Brahmaputra valley. Today, the Patkai includes mountains along the Indo-Myanmar border, encompassing Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, and parts of Upper Burma. British colonial authority in the Naga Hills began after their victory over the Burmese in the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826, leading to the enforcement of the Treaty of Yandabo. Within 15 years, the British annexed Assam, Cachar, Jaintia, and several tribal states of the Khasi Hills.
The first encounter between the Nagas and the British occurred in January 1832, when Major Francis Jenkins and Captain R Boileau Pemberton sought a land route from Manipur to Assam. Between 1839 and 1851, the British conducted 10 punitive expeditions into the Naga Hills.
Academic Sanghamitra Mishra, in her article The Nature of Colonial Intervention in the Naga Hills, 1840-80, notes that early colonial interests were driven by the strategic significance of the Naga Hills as a frontier to commercially valuable areas. By 1843, the discovery of tea plants in the lower Naga Hills provided substantial incentive for British annexation, leading to proposals for permanent military outposts to “effect progressive reform” and reinforcing the colonial belief in the region’s lawlessness.
Initially, the British adopted a policy of non-interference, but they abandoned this approach in 1866 in favour of a more aggressive forward policy, which established military posts and facilitated the colonisation of the Naga Hills. By 1873, the boundary between the Naga Hills and Manipur was established. This surveying and mapping, as Mishra argues, “contributed towards the extension of colonial hegemony in the area”.
The Naga Hills District was created in 1866 by the Government of British India, and it became a district of Assam province. Although colonial expansion was framed as an altruistic intervention, Mishra observes that “it was undoubtedly the strategic location of the Naga Hills and the need to protect the economy of the Assam valley”.
Notably, there is no evidence that the tribes self-identified as Naga in pre-colonial times. Records from 1841 indicated a racially diverse population with distinct identities, including groups such as the Angami, Ao, and Sema. Scholars argue that the term Naga emerged as a colonial construct, serving as a homogenous label that helped explain inter-tribal conflicts and justify British intervention in the hills.
Scholarly work indicates that the Naga Hills had a self-sufficient tribal economy prior to British intervention. Mishra cites documents detailing trade between the Naga Hills and surrounding plains. The Nagas excelled in irrigation, organised labour, and crop cultivation. Notably, the Angamis practised terrace cultivation and grew various crops, while tribes like the Lhotha, Rengma, Ao, Sema, and Konyak engaged in jhum cultivation.
To transform this economy, the British implemented a land revenue policy that imposed various taxes, including a house tax and a tax on rice grains. Thepfusalie Theunuo, in their PhD thesis Emerging Land Relations in Nagaland: A Study of the Angami Community (2019), notes that from 1880 to 1881, the Angami paid a house tax of two rupees and one maund of rice, while the Lhota and Rengma paid one rupee. By 1893, the Angami house tax had risen to three rupees, generating a net gain of Rs 6,000. Additionally, the British employed locals as wage labourers, known as coolies, making this a vital supplementary occupation for tribal communities to cope with the economic burden of British taxes.
By the late nineteenth century, the British established shops in strategic locations and organised market haats in the interior, creating local centres for exporting goods and distributing imports.
Christianity was first introduced to the Naga Hills by American missionary E W Clark, who arrived in the Ao Naga Hills in 1872, followed by British missionaries in 1878. Mishra argues that colonial accounts are biased, often portraying the Nagas as lacking definitive religious beliefs while emphasising their perceived ability to adopt new religions due to their so-called primitive state. She notes, “Like all pagans, the Nagas were considered fitter objects for the missionary than for the soldier,” during a period of increasing proselytising by the American Baptist Mission in the region.
In contrast, later accounts by British anthropologist J H Hutton reveals the rich diversity of pre-colonial Naga religious life, highlighting social ceremonies and the important role of magic within the community.
The resentment and resistance of the Nagas to colonial intervention in the Naga Hills are evident in the constant hostility directed at the British, both at their military outposts and during survey operations leading up to direct annexation.
A notable instance of this resistance occurred in present-day Kohima district, as cited by Professor Nigamananda Das of Nagaland University in his essay Revisiting Naga Resistance to British Colonialism: A Study of A Naga Village Remembered and Related Historical Texts. This village, consisting of just 500 houses, faced attacks in 1832, 1849, 1850, and 1879. In October 1879, before the final British assault, villagers killed British Deputy Commissioner G H Damant. Additionally, the Angami tribe refused to pay their first year’s tribute to the British and continued to raid British outposts.
There was also significant resistance to the spread of Christianity during the early years of British rule.
The recent auction of a Naga skull in England has sparked outrage among activists. Alok Kumar Kanungo, a faculty member at IIT Gandhinagar, discussed the historical context in an interview with indianexpress.com. He noted that in the 1890s, German anthropologist Philipp Wilhelm Adolf Bastian travelled to the Naga Hills and collected 222 objects for research. He later sent Otto Ehrenfried Ehlers to the region from 1891 to 1893, furthering colonial interventions.
Kumar emphasised that while the Naga people have a rich heritage encompassing civil architecture, wood carving, textiles, and metallurgy, colonial narratives often sensationalise headhunting, overshadowing the community’s profound history.
“During the peak of the museum movement in the 18th and 19th centuries, institutions like the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, UK, collected extensively, amassing 6,466 Naga objects. The Cambridge University Museum holds around 1,500 objects, while the British Museum has about 1,000,” he explained. “These materials include countless items of immense emotional and cultural value to the Nagas.”
To the Nagas, these remains embody their tradition, history, culture, identity, knowledge systems, inventions, and innovations. “The restoration of these physical remains requires immediate attention,” he insisted.
