Criminal charges levelled against India's leading living artist for an allegedly obscene depiction of a Hindu goddess have been quashed in a ruling that says religious extremism risks pushing the country into a "pre-Renaissance era".

Maqbool Fida Husain, 92, a Muslim who has been dubbed "the Picasso of India", was served with seven private criminal complaints by Hindu groups for the painting Bharat Mata (Mother India), a work representing the nation as a nude woman. The Delhi High Court judged that the picture, for which Mr Husain has apologised, carried no religious content and could not be construed as offensive.

"A painter has his own perspective of looking at things, and it cannot be the basis of initiating criminal proceedings," Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul said.

Akhil Sibal, Mr Husain's lawyer, told The Times that the ruling was an important step, "ensuring artistic freedoms are not made victims at the hands of extremists".

Claiming that the court's decision also represented a landmark defeat for an increasingly vocal and saffron-tinged moral police in India, Mr Sibal added that the complaints against Mr Husain were the result of an "organised, well-orchestrated and well-funded campaign to gain political millage against a painter who happens to be a Muslim".

Mr Husain has lived in self-imposed exile in Dubai since 2006 after his work, which has taken cues from Hindu sources since at least the 1970s, suddenly became a lightening rod for highly-charged religious sentiments.

In December a show of his paintings in Delhi was stormed by a mob that claimed to be linked to the right-wing Hindu Shiv Sena party, a group that was implicated in the Muslim-Hindu riots that claimed hundreds of lives in Bombay in 1993. Two years ago, a Husain exhibition in London was called off because of security concerns.

The controversy surrounding the painter again hit one of the centres of the international art world last month when demonstrators threatened to disrupt a sale of his work at Christie's in New York. The protest, against the auction of canvases that allegedly depicted Hindu deities in a "derogatory and vulgar" fashion, did little to diminish the enthusiasm of collectors. Husain's Battle of Ganga and Jamuna, based on the ancient Hindu epic Mahabharata, sold for £808,000, a record for any Indian contemporary painting.

Justice Kaul said: "It is most unfortunate that India's new puritanism is being carried out in the name of cultural purity and that a host of ignorant people are vandalising art and pushing us towards a pre-Renaissance era".

He added: "A painter at 90 deserves to be in his home painting his canvass."

Mr Husain's detractors vowed to continue their opposition to the painter. A spokesman for the Hindu-nationalist Vishwa Hindu Parishad party said that the artist's work "will never receive social acceptance" in India.

It remains unclear whether Mr Husain, who has been threatened by several extremist groups, will now return to his home country. Jatin Das, a leading Delhi-based artist who met Mr Husain recently in Dubai, said: "One could not mistake the urge in his eyes to come back and visit his land, his birthplace from where he is banished by people who have no clue what art is all about."

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