No halal or kosher ritual meat (kutha)

Sikhs of the Khalsa affirm the prohibition of kutha, meat from an animal killed by the slow, ritual method of halal or kosher slaughter. Refraining from kutha is one of the four cardinal prohibitions (kurahits) binding on initiated Sikhs. The Rahit, the Khalsa code of conduct, forbids eating meat prepared in the Muslim or Jewish ritual manner, a rule often understood as a rejection of ritual killing and, historically, as a mark of Sikh distinctness from the surrounding communities.

The prohibition of kutha meat is codified in the Sikh Rahit Maryada, the official code of conduct adopted by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee in 1945 after decades of consultation intended to standardize practice across the Sikh world, but its substance reaches back to the founding of the Khalsa by Guru Gobind Singh in 1699, when the four kurahits were first established as binding on the newly initiated order; historians of Sikhism generally read the rule, alongside the other kurahits, as part of a deliberate effort to mark the Khalsa's members as a visibly distinct community, separated in everyday practice from both the Muslim and Hindu populations among whom Sikhs lived. The prohibition rests on a different textual layer than core Sikh theology: unlike teachings grounded directly in the Guru Granth Sahib itself, the kutha ban belongs to the Rahit, the code of conduct literature, a distinction some modern reform-minded Sikhs have invoked to question its binding status, against the mainstream Khalsa position that Guru Gobind Singh's own institution of the kurahits carries equivalent authority.

Sikhs have long discussed what the prohibition of kutha implies about meat-eating generally. Many hold that where meat is eaten it should be jhatka, killed with a single blow, rather than by the ritual method, while others, and the practice of the community kitchen (langar), favour vegetarian food to include all. The prohibition is one of the disciplines that mark initiation into the Khalsa and expresses the tradition's stance against ritual forms it does not accept, without settling the wider question of diet, on which Sikhs continue to differ.

Some historians of Sikh identity read the rejection of kutha, the ritual method shared with both Muslim halal and Jewish kosher slaughter, as carrying a political as well as religious edge in the community's early history, formed as it was under Mughal rule in a period of recurrent conflict and, at times, persecution of Sikhs by the Mughal state; refusing a form of slaughter associated with the ruling power's own dietary law functioned, on this reading, as one further mark of the Khalsa's deliberate separation from Mughal authority, alongside its distinctive dress, uncut hair, and weapons, though the tradition itself grounds the rule in religious rather than explicitly political terms.