CASE STUDY
Pluralism · Ramadan · Culinary Diplomacy · Social Cohesion
February 2026
Abstract
This case study examines Indonesia’s so-called “takjil war” — the phenomenon of non-Muslim Indonesians competing with fasting Muslims to purchase Ramadan street snacks (takjil) — as an instance of organic, commercially-mediated intercommunal participation. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of culinary nationalism, banal multiculturalism, and civil society cohesion, the paper analyses the social mechanisms through which food markets serve as sites of interfaith negotiation. It then evaluates the transferability of this model to Singapore, examining structural convergences and divergences with Indonesia, with particular attention to the role of state-civil society relations, hawker culture, and racial capitalism in shaping the form that such negotiations can take in the city-state.
- Introduction
1.1 The Phenomenon
Every Ramadan in Indonesia, a peculiar contestation unfolds on urban street corners. From early afternoon, pop-up bazaars — pasar kaget — fill with vendors selling takjil: light, sweet snacks traditionally intended to break a Muslim’s fast at sundown. Kolak (stewed banana and sweet potato in coconut milk), klepon (glutinous rice flour balls filled with palm sugar), and es campur (shaved ice with syrup) appear alongside regional specialties. They sell out rapidly.
What is sociologically remarkable is who is buying them. Non-Muslim Indonesians — Christians, Hindus, Buddhists — engage with conspicuous enthusiasm in what has been termed the “takjil war.” Viral social media content, including videos of Catholic congregants buying snacks immediately after Ash Wednesday Mass and Protestant pastors “strategising” their takjil raids to the Mission Impossible soundtrack, has turned the phenomenon into a national conversation. Yet far from producing sectarian friction, the dynamic is characterised by affectionate ribbing across religious lines: Muslim commenters mock non-Muslims for depleting supplies; non-Muslims are jokingly enjoined to convert.
This paper argues that the takjil war is not merely an amusing cultural curiosity but a theoretically significant case of what we term “organic culinary pluralism” — a mode of intercommunal engagement that is voluntary, commercially grounded, and productive of social solidarity without requiring state orchestration.
1.2 Research Questions
This case study addresses three interrelated questions:
What social mechanisms underpin the takjil war’s success as a vehicle for interfaith tolerance?
How does the Indonesian case illuminate broader theoretical debates about food, religion, and pluralism?
What are the implications for Singapore’s model of managed multiracialism? - Theoretical Framework
2.1 Food as Intercommunal Negotiation
The relationship between food and identity has long occupied scholars of nationalism, ethnicity, and religion. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralist insight that food is “good to think” as well as good to eat opened the analytical space for treating cuisine as a semiotic system. Subsequent scholarship — notably that of Sidney Mintz on sugar and power, and Arjun Appadurai on the politics of Indian cookbooks — established food as a medium through which social hierarchies are both reproduced and contested.
More directly relevant is the concept of “culinary diplomacy,” elaborated by Paul Rockower, which identifies food as a soft power instrument capable of bridging cultural divides. Where Rockower’s framework remains statist in orientation, the takjil war suggests a grassroots variant: what might be called “street-level culinary diplomacy,” in which the market itself — rather than any deliberate policy — creates the conditions for cross-communal encounter.
This connects to Michael Billig’s concept of “banal nationalism,” extended here to “banal multiculturalism”: the everyday, unremarkable practices through which plural social identities are reproduced and affirmed without conscious ideological labour. The takjil war exemplifies this: participation requires no declaration of tolerance, no attendance at an official interfaith dialogue. It merely requires hunger, curiosity, and the willingness to queue.
2.2 Pancasila and the Indonesian Syncretic Tradition
Indonesia’s Pancasila — the five founding principles of the Republic, notably including the first principle of “Belief in the One God” (Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa) and the fifth of “Social Justice” — provides a formal ideological scaffolding for pluralism. The national motto, Bhinneka Tunggal Ika (“Unity in Diversity”), gives this scaffolding symbolic purchase.
Scholars including Robert Hefner have argued that Indonesian Islam is historically characterised by a syncretic accommodation of pre-Islamic Javanese, Hindu, and Buddhist cultural forms — a tradition he terms “civil Islam.” This background creates cultural soil in which interfaith commensality is not merely tolerated but positively valorised. The takjil war can be read as a contemporary expression of this long historical tendency: the religious calendar of the majority becomes a site of shared rather than exclusive enjoyment.
Crucially, however, the takjil war thrives in spite of, not because of, formal state ideology. It is not Pancasila that drives non-Muslims to the pasar kaget; it is appetite, habit, and a social grammar in which such behaviour is coded as charming rather than transgressive.
2.3 The Market as Civil Society
Habermas’s public sphere theory, for all its Eurocentric limitations, offers a useful entry point for thinking about where intercommunal negotiation happens in practice. The bazaar — a semi-public, commercially organised space — can be read as a vernacular public sphere in which actors from different social positions meet as (temporary) equals in the common pursuit of consumption.
Crucially, commercial transaction lowers the stakes of interaction. One need not profess admiration for another’s religion to buy their food. This “low threshold” character of the culinary encounter is theoretically significant: it makes pluralism available to people who might not self-identify as particularly tolerant, and it generates the repeated micro-interactions that social capital theory (Putnam) identifies as the building blocks of bridging capital across social cleavages. - Case Analysis: Mechanisms of the Takjil War
3.1 Scarcity and Competition as Solidarity
Paradoxically, it is the competitive dimension of the takjil war — the fact that popular snacks sell out, that non-Muslims are jockeying with Muslims for limited supply — that generates much of its social warmth. Scarcity creates urgency; urgency creates stakes; stakes create the comic drama that social media amplifies.
The resulting humour is structurally integrative. Muslim commenters who complain that non-Muslims have depleted the kolak supply are not expressing genuine sectarian resentment; they are engaging in the playful boundary-maintenance that characterises intimate social groups. The joke simultaneously acknowledges difference (you are not fasting; I am) and affirms shared desire (we both want the same food). This is the semiotic structure of “teasing solidarity.”
3.2 Digital Amplification and the Meme-ification of Tolerance
Social media — particularly TikTok, with its algorithm favouring emotive and humorous content — has transformed a local urban practice into a national cultural text. The viral video of Catholic content creator Evelyn Hutani buying takjil in a gamis robe with Ash Wednesday ashes still on her forehead is not merely funny; it is politically generative. It demonstrates, to a national audience, that religious identity markers are compatible with cross-religious participation.
The digital dimension also enables what we might term “communities of imagined commensality.” Viewers who have never visited the Bendungan Hilir market in Jakarta nonetheless participate in the takjil war as a national event, liking, sharing, and commenting in ways that affirm their identification with the pluralist social grammar it enacts.
This aligns with Benedict Anderson’s thesis on imagined communities, extended from print to digital media: the takjil war meme creates a community of “tolerant Indonesians” who recognise themselves in it.
3.3 Economic Embeddedness and Vendor Agency
The takjil war is not merely a consumption story; it is a production story too. Vendors like Rosa, who has sold takjil in Bendungan Hilir since 2007, actively welcome non-Muslim customers: “I think it’s great because it helps us sell more.” This vendor interest provides a material anchor for interfaith commensality. Markets that depend on religiously diverse custom have structural incentives to be inclusive.
This echoes findings from research on market integration in ethnically diverse societies: commercial interdependence reduces the attractiveness of ethnic exclusivism because exclusion is economically costly. In the takjil context, the structural incentive runs from vendor to vendor community: the pop-up market as an institution benefits from broad participation, creating a collective interest in the social grammar of openness.
3.4 The Limits of Organic Pluralism
The takjil war is not, of course, a panacea. Indonesia continues to face significant challenges of religious intolerance, including mob violence against religious minorities, blasphemy prosecutions, and the political mobilisation of Islamist identity. The same social media platforms that amplify the takjil war also host sectarian misinformation and coordinated harassment of minority groups.
The phenomenon should therefore be read as a site-specific, temporally bounded expression of a particular social grammar — one that is genuine but not representative of the totality of interfaith relations in Indonesia. Its theoretical significance lies not in what it reveals about Indonesia as a whole, but in what it demonstrates about the conditions under which organic culinary pluralism can emerge and function. - Comparative Analysis: Implications for Singapore
4.1 Structural Convergences
Singapore and Indonesia share a number of structural features relevant to the analysis. Both are majority-Muslim or significant-Muslim-population Southeast Asian polities with constitutionally enshrined secular frameworks. Both have strong street food traditions in which ethnically and religiously marked food is widely consumed across communal lines. And both have multi-decade histories of state management of ethnic and religious diversity.
The Singaporean Geylang Serai Ramadan bazaar is the most obvious structural analogue to Indonesia’s pasar kaget. Every year, the bazaar draws Singaporeans of all racial and religious backgrounds, who come to purchase Malay and Muslim food, clothing, and crafts. The consumption pattern is, on the surface, similar: non-Muslims buying food associated with Ramadan.
Dimension Indonesia (Takjil War) Singapore (Geylang Serai Bazaar)
Primary food context Street-level pop-up markets State-designated fairground bazaar
Organising principle Organic, market-driven State-managed, commercially licensed
Social media character Viral, humour-driven, grassroots Official promotion + organic content
Intercommunal framing Playful competition / solidarity Tourism / multicultural spectacle
Vendor dependency on diversity High (survival-level stakes) Moderate (state subsidy buffers)
Scale of digital reach National, generational National, with tourist dimension
4.2 The State-Civil Society Distinction
The most significant structural divergence between the Indonesian and Singaporean cases is the role of the state. Indonesia’s takjil war is characterised by its spontaneity: it requires no government initiative, no racial harmony campaign, no official endorsement. Its power as an indicator of social cohesion derives precisely from this quality — it is what people do when left to themselves.
Singapore’s approach to multicultural management has historically been characterised by what scholars including Chua Beng Huat term “multiracialism,” a state-managed framework in which racial and religious identities are formally recognised, institutionally managed, and normatively constrained. The Racial Harmony Day picnic, the mandatory inter-racial interaction components of national education, and the carefully maintained racial quotas in public housing all reflect a philosophy in which tolerance is too important to leave to civil society alone.
This is not a criticism: Singapore’s model has produced an enviable record of inter-communal stability in a deeply diverse city-state. But it does mean that the specific mechanism of the takjil war — organic, commercially-driven, state-independent — operates differently in the Singaporean context, where even spontaneous cultural participation tends to be quickly incorporated into an official multicultural narrative.
4.3 Hawker Culture as Analogous Institution
Singapore’s UNESCO-inscribed hawker culture offers the closest functional analogue to Indonesia’s pasar kaget as a site of organic intercommunal encounter. Hawker centres bring together Chinese, Malay, and Indian food stalls in shared dining spaces; Singaporeans of all backgrounds regularly eat across “racial” food lines, and the shared table is a genuine site of what Putnam would call bridging social capital.
However, the hawker centre’s everyday, non-seasonal character gives it a different phenomenological quality from the Ramadan bazaar. The takjil war’s power is partly a function of its temporal specificity: it is keyed to a sacred calendar, it is time-limited, and it involves an element of scarcity and urgency that everyday hawker dining does not. The Geylang Serai bazaar shares this seasonal character but, as noted, is organised and framed differently.
4.4 The Hari Raya Analogue and its Limits
The closest Singaporean analogue to the takjil war’s specific dynamic — non-majority individuals enthusiastically participating in a minority-majority practice in ways that generate affectionate cross-communal humour — may be found in open-house culture. During Hari Raya Aidilfitri, Chinese and Indian Singaporeans routinely visit Malay-Muslim households for food and celebration, and this cross-communal visiting has genuine warmth and is widely regarded as a marker of social health.
Yet open-house culture is again partially state-mediated (it is encouraged by official campaigns) and occurs in private rather than public commercial space. It lacks the viral, competitive, market-mediated quality of the takjil war that seems generative of its particular form of social humour and solidarity.
A productive question for Singapore’s social planners and civil society actors, then, is whether conditions can be created for something more analogous to the takjil war’s organic character: commercial, public, competitive in a playful sense, and genuinely civil-society-driven rather than state-orchestrated.
4.5 Risks and Considerations for Singapore
Any application of lessons from the Indonesian case to Singapore must grapple with important contextual differences. Singapore’s racial categories are more rigidly institutionalised (the CMIO framework — Chinese, Malay, Indian, Others), and the political stakes of perceived racialisation of markets or cultural events are accordingly higher. What reads as charming in Indonesia — non-Muslims donning Muslim attire for comic effect — might, in Singapore’s more institutionalised racial-management framework, be read as appropriation or mockery.
Singapore’s smaller physical size also means that social media controversies propagate faster and with less regional variation to absorb them. The relative homogeneity of Singapore’s mediasphere reduces the buffering effect that Indonesia’s regional diversity provides: a video that plays as charming in Jakarta can be more readily recoded as offensive when shared into a national conversation without regional context.
Finally, the economic stakes differ. Indonesian pasar kaget vendors operate without state support and have strong material incentives to welcome diverse custom. Singapore’s bazaar infrastructure is more heavily institutionalised and subsidised, which may reduce both the urgency of economic inclusion and the vendor-level investment in maintaining open markets.
- Policy and Civil Society Implications
5.1 For Singapore’s Multicultural Framework
The Indonesian takjil war suggests several implications for thinking about Singapore’s approach to intercommunal relations:
Tolerance of organic spontaneity: Singapore’s multicultural management framework might benefit from deliberately creating more space for civil-society-driven, commercially-organised intercommunal encounters, rather than channelling all such activity through official frameworks. The hawker centre’s relative autonomy from racial management is precisely what gives it its integrative power.
Leveraging scarcity and competition: Events that create genuine competitive stakes — limited-availability seasonal foods, pop-up markets, street bazaars organised around religious calendars — generate the emotional engagement that drives social media amplification and community formation. Official events tend to be structured to avoid conflict; but managed, affectionate conflict may be sociologically generative.
Digital ethnography as social barometer: The viral character of the takjil war makes it a useful indicator of the health of interfaith relations. Singapore policymakers and civil society researchers might pay closer attention to organic social media content around religious holidays as a barometer of grassroots intercommunal sentiment, distinct from survey-based measures.
Cross-religious food as public health: If the hawker centre is already a site of banal multiculturalism, deliberate policies that amplify its seasonal, festive dimensions — Ramadan specials, Deepavali pop-ups, CNY street bazaars with cross-communal food — could replicate some of the takjil war’s dynamic within Singapore’s institutional context.
5.2 For Indonesian Studies and Regional Comparativism
The takjil war case underlines the value of attending to micro-level, commercially-embedded social practices as theoretically significant data. The phenomenon has received little attention from political scientists and sociologists relative to its theoretical richness. It invites comparison not only with Singapore but with Malaysia (where Ramadan bazaars exist in a very different inter-communal context), the Philippines (where Muslim minority communities navigate majority Catholic public culture), and Bali (where Hindu-majority culture interacts with Muslim-majority national frameworks).
It also raises questions about the relationship between digital mediation and intercommunal tolerance. Is the takjil war generative of genuine tolerance, or does it perform tolerance at the level of representation while leaving underlying structural inequalities intact? This is the critical-theory challenge to the banal multiculturalism thesis, and it is one that deserves empirical investigation. - Conclusion
The takjil war is a small thing: queues outside pop-up stalls, viral videos of women in gamis robes, playful TikTok comments invoking the Shahada. Yet small things, analysed carefully, illuminate large structures. In this case, what is illuminated is the capacity of commercial food markets — when structured by scarcity, seasonal urgency, and digital amplification — to serve as sites of organic intercommunal negotiation that neither require nor are reducible to state management.
Indonesia’s success in this domain is historically contingent: it reflects the specific character of Indonesian Islam’s syncretic tradition, the regional diversity that buffers the national mediasphere, and the material conditions of informal urban food markets. These conditions are not straightforwardly replicable in Singapore.
But the theoretical insight — that low-threshold, commercially-organised, temporally-specific cultural encounters can generate bridging social capital and affectionate cross-communal solidarity more effectively than many state-orchestrated multicultural initiatives — travels well. For Singapore, a city whose social planners have long sought to nurture precisely this kind of organic pluralism, the takjil war offers not a blueprint but a provocation: What would it look like to trust civil society and the market a little more?
How beautiful my Indonesia is; its (religious) tolerance is so great. — TikTok commenter @ngopoik, Ramadan 2026
Whether Singapore can generate equivalent moments of grassroots wonder — and whether it needs to, given its different institutional architecture — remains an open and productive question.
References and Further Reading
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso.
Appadurai, A. (1988). “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 30(1), 3–24.
Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. Sage Publications.
Chua, B. H. (2003). Multiculturalism in Singapore: An Instrument of Social Control. Race & Class, 44(3), 58–77.
Habermas, J. (1989). The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. MIT Press.
Hefner, R. W. (2000). Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia. Princeton University Press.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (1964). Mythologiques: Le Cru et le Cuit. Plon.
Mintz, S. (1985). Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. Viking.
Putnam, R. (2000). Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster.
Rockower, P. (2012). “Propositions for Culinary Diplomacy.” Place Branding and Public Diplomacy, 8(1), 37–45.
The Straits Times. (2026, February 28). “In Indonesia, non-Muslims join race to buy Ramadan bazaar snacks.”