It is indeed an honour to be selected as President by the eminent historians constituting the Board of the Asian Association of World Historians. The offer of this position is a recognition of the contribution of my colleagues and me to the organisation of an extremely successful Fifth Conference of the AAWH at India International Centre, New Delhi, earlier this month and I accept it with utmost gratitude.

To follow in the footsteps of the outgoing President Shigeru Akita invokes in me a sense of deep humility. He has taken the Association to a stature which no one could have expected to happen in such a short time of two terms. I wish to place on record the deep appreciation of my colleagues and myself for his unstinting support in the organisation of the Fifth Conference of the AAWH.

It shall be my endeavour as the first President of the Association from South Asia to promote world history and global history in our part of the world. The 5th Conference was a huge success on many counts, the diversity of themes, the scale of participation of delegates and the experiment with multiple modes of presentation, offline, online and hybrid, to meet the challenge of Covid and travel restrictions. 

We hope to build on that foundation in the coming months. The perspective of connected histories of the globe, especially the South, has informed decades of research and years of teaching by my colleagues and me, even when this work went by different names. My initial work on independence and partition in India widened to explore other partitioned countries, such as Ireland. I found my work on the partition of India cross-fertilised by insights into how survivors of sectarian violence in Ireland refashioned their post partitioned selves

I seek your cooperation in continuing the initiatives of the Association. I hope to work towards expanding the reach and deepening the influence of the AAWH. I trust that a greater diversity of members from across Asia will be reflected in a wide range of perspectives on global and world history.

Sucheta Mahajan