FRANKFURT, Germany — India’s master of the sitar and worldwide cult hero of the hippies said more than a year ago that the hippie movement was dying in America. Now, Ravi Shankar says, it’s dead.

"All that Haight-Ashbury, flower, love, happiness stuff is gone," he said in an interview. "Young people in America are becoming more serious. They said so themselves when they burnt the effigy of a hippie in Haight-Ashbury a long time ago."

"But in Europe they’re a year or two behind America. They’re just aping it here. It creates a bad vibration. They’re past that in the States."

Commenting on a concert he gave at the Jahrhunderthalle in Frankfurt-Hoechst Friday night, the master sitarist showed unhappiness at the reception given him by the young German audience, many of whom had left their seats to sit on the floor in front of the stage.

"I just want the same attention that a concert of classical Western music would get," he said after the concert. "Their attitude was flippant and superficial — lying down there, squeezing their girl friends ... Many of them were stoned."

At one point during the concert he delayed the beginning of his number to say, "I humbly ask some of our friends ... to stop smoking," referring to what he later said he thought was probably marijuana and hashish.

However, he says, "In the States I’m very happy now. I find the best audiences in the world in America. They have become more serious. That frenzy period is gone now."

Shankar, 49, a 5-foot, 3-inch-tall native of Bombay, who held his hands before and during the concert as though h were about to enter an operating room, referred to his sudden rise in popularity.

"From 1960 to, say, 1962, I used to play to full houses of people who wanted to hear classical Indian music," he said.

"But then I got ’rediscovered,’ as they say. The phantasmagorical effect of the music attracted the flippant and superficial, who associated it with drugs. What pains me very much is that they mix up the whole scene."

Shankar says that he was not at all upset, as has so often been reported, when his former pupil, George Harrison, introduced the sitar to the Beatles. "You can do many things with an instrument like this," he remarked. "I just don’t want to be associated with that kind of music."

Surrounded by the smoke of burning incense in his dressing room (which he also uses on stage), Shankar complained that also in his homeland there are many people "exploiting the young — selling them hashish.

"Kids — love them. There are many problems in the United States — Vietnam, draft, drugs. But they must have discipline. They cannot throw away discipline. They must work," he says. "There is no instant karma."