Ravi Shankar flays Husain for nude painting

BANGALORE - Spiritual guru Sri Sri Ravi Shankar Monday expressed surprise over the “hue and cry” over painter M.F. Husain’s move to give up Indian citizenship and chided him for painting Indian gods in the nude.

“While India has a policy of free expression, one cannot accept blatant insult to the heroes of its land. It is the intention behind a man’s creativity which is questionable,” Ravi Shankar said in a statement.

“In one of Husain’s paintings of Mahatma Gandhi, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein and Hitler, he painted only Hitler nude and said that his way of humiliating a person is to paint him nude.

“No one has ever sculpted Rama and Sita as nude. Creative expression is always welcome. No country has been as liberal as India… Any nude woman could have been painted by him but calling the women Sita, Lakshmi (and) Saraswati shows his perversion and hatred.

“Will M.F. Husain show the same creativity and the same spirit with Islamic heroes and would he, then, be able retain his Qatari citizenship?

Double standards, bias and hatred do not go well with men of excellence.”