Responsible for: The Department of Global Arts, Cultures and Design, its staff, projects and collections.

Research interests: Ancient South Asian history and art and its enduring impact on contemporary popular culture; collecting histories and the colonial legacies inherent in many museum collections; community partnerships.

Sushma joined National Museums Scotland in 2026. Previously she was Curator of South Asia at the British Museum where she curated the award-winning, 5-star reviewed exhibition Ancient India: living traditions and co-authored the accompanying book (2025). The exhibition explored the origins of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist art in India’s ancient and powerful nature spirits and the spread of this imagery globally, including here in the UK today.

She 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: Looking back to build future shared collections project (2021-2024). Sushma is currently co-supervising a Collaborative Doctoral Project titled Women Collectors of South Asia: Gender, Material Culture and Empire, while another titled Collectors, curators and cultural brokers: South Asian contributions to the British Museum has been successfully completed (2025). Sushma was part of the multi-disciplinary team involved in the redisplay of the Sir Joseph Hotung Gallery for China and South Asia (2017).

Her first monograph Chandragupta Maurya: the creation of a national hero in India was published with UCL Press (2023, Open Access), and she is currently writing a popular children’s book on ancient Indian history with Penguin Random House India (forthcoming 2027). She has written widely on South Asian history, art, and popular culture, including articles in the Journal of South Asian Studies, Journal of Ancient History, and Journal of the Royal Numismatic Society, as well as chapters in edited volumes. Keen to bring these subjects to a wider audience, Sushma has appeared in magazines, newspapers, podcasts, and radio including BBC Front Row, and founded, presented and produced The Wonder House podcast (2019-2022) to share innovative people-centred projects across the museum sector internationally.

Sushma is a Council Member (Trustee) of the National Army Museum (2026 onwards) and was previously Vice Chair of Trustees at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre (2020-2026).

Sushma has undergraduate degrees and a PhD from UCL.

Selected publications

Sushma Jansari & Sureshkumar Muthukumaran, Ancient India: living traditions (London: British Museum Press; Thames & Hudson, 2025).

Sushma Jansari, 'Sakha objects at the British Museum', in Material and Spiritual Culture of the Peoples of Yakutia in World Museums (17th - 19th century) Vol.3 Book 1 (Yakutsk: Aiyar, 2025), pp.494-515.

Sushma Jansari, Chandragupta Maurya: The creation of a national hero in India (London: UCL Press, 2023). DOI: 10.14324/111.9781800083882

Sushma Jansari, ‘South Asia’ in R. Mairs (ed.), The Graeco-Bactrian and Indo-Greek World (Routledge, 2020), pp. 38–55. DOI: 10.4324/9781315108513-4

T. Argounova-Low, A. Brown & S. Jansari, Model of a Summer Camp (London: British Museum Press, 2020).

Sushma Jansari, ‘Buildings with a Message – Experimenting with a Rich Mosaic of Objects and Voices’ in RETHINK Design Guide: Architecture for a post-pandemic world (London: RIBA Publishing, 2020), pp. 66–69.

Sushma Jansari, ‘From Geography to Paradoxography: the use, transmission and survival of Megasthenes Indica’, Journal of Ancient History 8:1 (2019), pp. 26–49. DOI: 10.1515/jah-2019-0013

Sushma Jansari, ‘Colonial Collecting in Ceylon: Dispersing the Hugh Nevill Collections across the British Isles’ in A.B. Peyton and K.A. Paul (eds), Arts of South Asia: Cultures of Collecting (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2019), pp. 63–94.

Sushma Jansari, ‘Redisplay of the Jaina collections at the British Museum’, Jaina Studies 13 (2017), pp. 46–49.

Sushma Jansari & Richard Ricot, ‘Megasthenes and the Astomoi: a case study into ethnography and paradoxography’ in H. Brinkhaus and J. Wieshöfer (eds), Classica et Orientalia (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2016), pp. 85–96. DOI: 10.2307/j.ctvcwnxxw.8

Sushma Jansari, ‘Roman Coins from the Masson and Mackenzie Collections in the British Museum’, South Asian Studies 29:2 (2013), pp. 177–193. DOI: 10.1080/02666030.2013.833762

Sushma Jansari, ‘Roman Coins from the Mackenzie Collection at the British Museum’, Numismatic Chronicle 172 (2012), pp. 93–104.