By Nawab Khan, Kuwait News Agency
Brussels: The Dar Al Athar Al Islamiya museum in Kuwait will be lending two of its collections from ancient times for an arts festival on India, to be held in Belgium in October.
"Europalia" is a major international arts festival organized by Belgium every two years to celebrate one invited country's cultural heritage. The organizers in a press conference in Brussels Monday said this year's Europalia festival will focus on India.
The Europalia festival starts on October 4 and continues for four month ending on January 26, 2014 and will feature India's culture in every form of artistic expression, both historical and contemporary, through hundreds of events in Brussels and in other Belgian cities, said Kristine De Mulder, director general of Europalia.
The festival will kick off on October 4 by the Indian President Pranab Mukherjee and King Philippe I of Belgium in Brussels. There are nearly 55 lenders to the exhibition.
"Dar Al Athar Al Islamiya in Kuwait is one of our main lenders of this exhibition who are lending two really extraordinary subjects coming from Kuwait for this exhibition" Naman Ahuja, associate professor of Indian art and architecture at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, said in an interview with KUNA.
Ahuja, who is also the curator for the exhibition titled "Body in Indian Art" which will show how the common Indian thinks about the human body, noted that one Kuwaiti relic is a pure silver mask made during the Gupta period (350 BC) which was found in the region of Peshawar. The other Kuwaiti relic is an ivory statue that is dated back to 300 BC.
He referred to the comparison of the human body in Islam and Hinduism, pointing out that "not only can there be a comparison but It has been a very enriching experience as a scholar to go into different kinds of real literature of the history of Islam and comparing it with Hindu and Buddhist traditions.""The greatest contribution in the history of the world on the thought of not worshipping the physical body and the idea that we should not be worshipping images has come from Islam" added Ahuja.
"In the same way ancient Buddhists did not allow for image worshipping. The early Buddhists had no image worship. Vedic India has no image worship. This came later," he explained, adding that these are very solid common comparisons.
The Vedic period was a period in Indian history during which the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, were composed estimated around 1700 BC.
