In 1936, a sixteen-year-old Naga girl called Gaidinliu was arrested in Northeast India.
She had been captured after weeks on the run from the British army, as the authorities believed that she had instigated an uprising against them. In addition to putting her in jail, Gaidinliu’s personal possessions were seized and sent to the Pitt Rivers Museum. Since then, her belongings have been stored at the museum as the ‘Gaidinliu Collection’. While this collection has been in the museum for 80 years, it has never been put on display.
For the last four years, researchers from the University of Edinburgh, the University of Oxford, and from Naga communities have been working on a project that has taken digital renderings of these objects to Northeast India. A wealth of responses to them have been created by Naga community members, ranging from the creation of new textiles to oral and visual accounts. These responses, along with the original collection, will be displayed in a special exhibition this autumn.
Watch this space for further updates as we prepare to exhibit the Gaidinliu Collection for the first time in the Museum’s history.
