Long before he visited India, photographer Mitch Epstein fell in love with the concept. He was inspired by footage of the Beatles at the maharishi's ashram as a young guy from small-town New England saw Ravi Shankar play the sitar at the Woodstock festival and spent $35 to be inducted into transcendental meditation.

He didn't really tour the subcontinent with his first wife, Indian film-maker Mira Nair, until he was in his late 20s, after studying photography in New York under the renowned American street photographer Garry Winogrand.

Epstein traveled to India eight times between 1978 and 1989, taking tens of thousands of photographs and working on three of Nair's films (So Far from India, India Cabaret, and Salaam Bombay!). This photograph was shot at the annual Republic Day procession in New Delhi in 1984, the year of Indira Gandhi's murder, and appears in a new retrospective collection of Epstein's India work.

Two connections contribute to the closeness of his crowd scene: the first is between his camera and the guy wearing the exuberantly patterned scarf that matches the balloons behind him. The second is the loose hug between the two young guys on the group's left, who seem to have strayed in from a separate film shoot.

Epstein approached such pictures from both an insider and an outsider's perspective. “Through my marriage and family life, I gained an Indian perspective – not fully, but more than a tourist would.”

Even yet, he acknowledges that it took him three decades to really see the India he shot. His book was a huge effort, requiring him to go through hundreds of contact sheets in search of pictures that matched the hues of his memories.

Thanks to Tim Adams at The Guardian whose reporting provided the original basis for this story.