An auction house in the United Kingdom on Wednesday took down the human remains of Naga people from the auction following protests from the Forum for Naga Reconciliation (FNR) and other organisations.

Swan Fine Art at Tetsworth in Oxfordshire took the decision after Nagaland chief minister Neiphiu Rio wrote to foreign minister S. Jaishankar on Tuesday seeking the latter’s intervention to halt the “auction of the human remains of our people” in the UK.

Shrunken heads and skulls were supposed to go under the hammer on Wednesday.

Dolly Kikon, professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, in a post on X said: “ @SwanAtTetsworthThank you for doing the right thing, and taking down all the human remains from the auction. We look forward to working with you to make sure the remains are returned to the respective communities. @prm_laurita and @Pitt_Rivers thank you for working with us.”

Thanking the Nagaland government for taking a stand, Kikon said it was a “historic day for the Naga people as we work together and stand together to reclaim our voice, our story, and our path to healing together”.

In a dialogue held at the Jubilee Memorial College, Mokokchung, in November last year, on the repatriation of Naga ancestral human remains by the Recover, Restore, and Decolonise (RRaD), founded by the FNR in 2021, Kikon offered “insights into the significance of returning human remains taken during the period of British imperialism”.

In his letter to Jaishankar, Rio said the “proposed auction” had been received by all sections in a “negative manner as it is a highly emotional and sacred issue for our people”.

“You will agree that the human remains of any deceased person belongs to those people and their land. Moreover, the auctioning of human remains deeply hurts the sentiments of the people, is an act of dehumanisation and is considered as continued colonial violence upon our people,” Rio said, beseeching the external affairs minister to take up the issue with the Indian High Commission in the UK “to undertake necessary steps to ensure that the auction of the human remains of our people is halted”.

The FNR had said a 19th-century “horned Naga human skull” was to have been auctioned off on October 9. The Naga ancestral human skull, valued at 3,500-4,000 UK pounds, was part of an auction titled “The curious collector sale” and was catalogued alongside antiquarian books, manuscripts, paintings, jewelry, ceramics and furniture, the FNR letter said.

Condemning the auction as an “inhumane and violent practice where Indigenous ancestral human remains continue to be collector’s items in the 21st century”, the FNR said the Naga human remains “were taken without people’s consent — in effect appropriated — by colonial administrators and soldiers who occupied the Naga homeland” in the 19th century even as Naga villages resisted British punitive expeditions.

According to Professor Kikon, The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford “possesses the largest Naga collection in the world. There are approximately 6,459 items comprising human remains and non-human remains (like textiles, baskets, musical instruments, wood carvings, hunting and farming tools, and jewelleries)”.

The Musuem had also criticised the sale of human remains.