Torsten Tschacher is a Heisenberg Fellow of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and lecturer for Tamil at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He received his PhD in South Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore in 2007, and has subsequently held positions at the universities of Heidelberg and Göttingen as well as Freie Universität Berlin. His research focuses on the history and discursive traditions of Muslims around the Bay of Bengal. His book Race, Religion, and the ‘Indian Muslim’ Predicament in Singapore was published in 2018 with Routledge, and he has recently co-edited, with Pushkar Sohoni, Non-Shia Practices of Muḥarram in South Asia and the Diaspora: Beyond Mourning (Routledge 2022). He has also translated two novels from Tamil to German.