Sikh Dietary Code

The one dietary prohibition stated plainly in the Sikh Rehat Maryada, the code of conduct maintained by the Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, is against kutha meat, meat from an animal killed slowly by ritual bleeding, the method used in both Muslim halal and Jewish kosher slaughter. What the code names instead as acceptable, for a Sikh who chooses to eat meat, is jhatka, a single strike meant to kill the animal instantly, a distinction about method rather than about the animal itself.

The prohibition is read by Sikh institutions as a marker of independence rather than a borrowed rule: rejecting kutha meat distinguished the Khalsa, the Sikh order founded by Guru Gobind Singh at the end of the seventeenth century, from the ritual slaughter customs of the Mughal court and from Islamic dietary law more broadly, at a period when Sikh and Mughal authority were in open conflict. The Nihang order, historically associated with Khalsa militancy, has been particularly linked with jhatka meat as a matter of identity rather than simple diet.

The Rehat Maryada was given its present written form in 1945, codifying practices and disputes that had circulated among Sikh reformers for decades before, and the kutha prohibition is the clause of it that speaks most directly to food.

Beyond the kutha prohibition, Sikh institutions do not agree on whether meat should be eaten at all, and the disagreement runs between bodies with real authority rather than between casual opinions. The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee, which administers the Golden Temple and many other major gurdwaras, serves only vegetarian food in its langars, the free communal kitchens, on the reasoning that a meal shared across every caste and faith must contain nothing any guest could object to eating. The Akhand Kirtani Jatha and the Namdhari Sikhs go further, holding vegetarianism to be a religious requirement for their own members rather than only a practical courtesy in a shared kitchen.

Set against this, the Rehat Maryada itself makes no such demand: its text prohibits kutha meat and says nothing that bars meat as such, and lay practice in Punjab and the diaspora reflects that gap, with a substantial number of Sikhs eating jhatka meat as a matter of course. Scholars of Sikhism generally describe the movement as a whole as neither vegetarian nor carnivorous by doctrine, with the real variation running along institutional and regional lines rather than along a single settled rule, which is why the question is recorded here as genuinely open rather than resolved in either direction.