In 1947, the year India gained its independence from Britain, an English sculptor named Marguerite Milward wrote to her friend, the Cambridge archaeologist John Henry Hutton, offering to donate to the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology her entire collection of portrait sculptures of native ‘types’ from the Indian subcontinent. The collection was the product of three years of expeditions throughout India's Deccan Peninsula and up into the Himalayas, and constituted over 100 representations of men and women, mainly from Adivasi or ‘tribal’ communities. Her offer was eagerly accepted by Hutton, himself a former administrator in north-east India and a prominent authority in physical anthropology. He considered the heads to be a great ‘service’ to anthropology, describing them later as ‘the most accurate representations of tribesmen from the Himalayas to cape cormorin’ that he had ever seen (Hutton 1949).

The portraits were accessioned into the Museum's collections in two stages: a first series of 100 plaster casts in 1948 and a smaller consignment of bronzes in 1951, two years before the artist's death. Following the initial eagerness with which the heads were received, however, it seems that their significance and usefulness to the Museum, and to anthropology, was swiftly re-evaluated. There is no living or institutional memory of the heads ever having been exhibited following their donation and they were soon removed to a behind-the-scenes corridor of the Museum, where they would eventually be rediscovered in the 1980s.