Agartala, Jan. 27: Tripura's leading painter and mime artist Swapan Nandy has captured the transformation of Mandai, the site of a massacre three-and-a-half decades ago, with his colours.

On June 8, 1980, 200 lives were lost in a span of two hours at Mandai village. Apart from making national headlines, this massacre, part of ethnic riots in two districts of Tripura, also marked the beginning of a bloody phase in the state's history with a succession of insurgencies thriving over the next two decades.

But the Mandai massacre is now history and the area has made major strides in economic development - so much so that not a single family in the entire block is without a bank account.

An exhibition of Nandy's paintings at the art gallery of Agartala Municipal Corporation from January 15-22 poignantly represented the serene obscurity of Mandai, 32km northwest of Agartala. The portraits of a woman and a bird conveyed the prevailing sense of peace and amity.

A graduate from Government College of Art and Craft, Nandy retired as an officer of the information and culture department in 2008. But his zest for art remains as strong as ever.

His exhibition, based on the theme, A bird and a solitary girl, showcased 24 paintings with a ubiquitous bird and a girl completely at peace with herself.

"I visited Mandai several times in the course of my work as a government officer and was a witness to the transformation of the place from an ethnic cauldron to its present state. I thought I would preserve this in my paintings," Nandy said.

The landscape in the paintings represents mother nature in her pristine purity while the girl and bird symbolise human and animal lives at peace in the lap of nature, he added.

An art critic described the paintings as "surreal" but Nandy differed with this view. "This is simply my imagination. I thought of no 'ism' while presenting my imagination in colours," he said.