New Delhi, July 20 - Once an extension of Southeast Asian art because of the cultural intermingling down the centuries, art from India's northeast is now using photorealism, cartoon and comic techniques and other neo-contemporary styles, says a young art researcher from the region.

Art from the northeast does not make headlines in mainstream India because of its disconnect with the rest of the country. But an essay, 'A Metaphor and Some Young Turks: Art of the Northeast' by Moushumi Kandali, has for the first time turned the spotlight on artistic genres in the region.

For nearly 500 years, art in northeastern India was confined to religious and traditional domains.

'The emergence of modern art in the early decades of 20th century Assam had been a complete departure from traditional art forms like the miniature, manuscripts, painting, mural, traditional sculpture and crafts,' Kandali says.

The changing trends in northeastern art reflect the existential conflicts of the region like terrorism, alienation, backwardness and a subtle clash between modernity and tradition.

Modernism in Assamese art coincided with the publication of the state's first literary magazine Arunodoi by the American Baptist Mission in which illustrators used British style wood-block reliefs for the first time.

'But four Kolkata-trained Assamese artists, Muktanath Bordoloi, Jagat Singh Kachari, Suren Bordoloi and Pratap Baruah, really contributed to the growth of modern northeastern art in the second and the third decade of the 20th century,' Kandali says.

The early influences were romantic, but the 1950s and 60s, says Kandali, brought in expressionistic, surrealistic and post-impressionistic idioms.

Mrinmoy Debbarma, a young artist from Tripura, uses photorealism and comic strip techniques and characters from the popular cartoon 'Tom and Jerry' to talk of terror and violence in the region and mechanisation of life.

'His recurrent motifs of masked terrorists raise questions about the making and unmaking of terror,' Kandali says.