How ancient India transformed the world
Event information
11 July 2025
18.30–19.30
Reading Room
Price
- £10
- £8 (Members)
- £8 (Concessions)
This event will be recorded
16+
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Discover how ancient Indian art, religion, science and mythology have shaped cultures across Asia, the Mediterranean and beyond at this eye-opening in-conversation event.
The new exhibition Ancient India: living traditions (22 May – 19 October 2025) reaches back more than 2,000 years to explore the origins of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist sacred art, tracing its spread beyond the subcontinent.
Historian William Dalrymple will discuss his latest book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (2024), which highlights the Indian ideas that transformed the ancient world – and modern societies. He will be joined in conversation by Dr Sushma Jansari, Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia Collections and the exhibition's lead curator, and Dr Sureshkumar Muthukumaran, historian of the ancient world at the National University of Singapore. The panel will discuss how Indian religions and their art were shared across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia and along the Silk Roads to East Asia and beyond, to become a global phenomena.
After the event, Dalrymple will be signing copies of The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (2024), from 19.30–20.00. The book will be available to purchase at the bookshop in the Great Court.
This event is part of the public programme supporting the exhibition Ancient India: living traditions (22 May – 19 October 2025).
Booking information
- Concessions include Disabled visitors, job seekers, seniors (60+) and students. The event is free for Disabled visitors' assistants (booking required).
- Doors to the Reading Room will open at approximately 18.00 for the audience to take their seats.
- Please note only bottled water is permitted in the Reading Room. No food or other drinks are allowed.
- Event ticket holders no longer need to join queues that develop outside the Museum gates. Instead, you can go straight to the front of the queue, show your confirmation email or paper ticket – and security colleagues will guide you to the fast-track lane (leading to the security tent). This procedure will be in place at both entrances, but we recommend that you use the Main entrance on Great Russell Street for the quickest possible access.
- Please allow time to go through a security check, which includes a bag check upon entry to the Museum.
About the speakers
William Dalrymple is the bestselling author of White Mughals (2002), The Last Mughal (2006), and Return of a King (2013). He has written and presented three television series, one of which won the Grierson Award for Best Documentary Series at BAFTA. He writes regularly for the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the Guardian. In 2018, he was presented with the prestigious President's Medal by the British Academy for his outstanding literary achievement and for co-founding the Jaipur Literature Festival. He was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers for 2020 by Prospect.
About the speakers cont.
Dr Sushma Jansari is Tabor Foundation Curator of South Asia Collections at the British Museum and a trustee of the Roald Dahl Museum. Jansari was lead curator of the award-winning Manchester Museum South Asia Gallery in partnership with the British Museum (opened 2023), and co-investigator of the AHRC-funded Sloane Lab project (2021–24). She is the curator of Ancient India: living traditions and co-authored the accompanying book. Jansari shares South Asian art and history on TikTok and Instagram.
About the speakers cont.
Dr Sureshkumar Muthukumaran is a historian of the ancient world at the National University of Singapore. His work focuses on long-distance interactions between peoples in ancient Afro-Eurasia with an eye to movements of flora and fauna. His first book, The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean (2023), was the winner of the 2024 Jerry Bentley Prize in World History awarded by the American Historical Association.