How the book came about

For thirty-five years Amar Talwar's negatives sat in cardboard cartons. At the end of the 1980s he gave up photography for acting, packed the film away without much thought, and never expected to go back to it.

His son Manoj, better known as Tally, and their friend Nitin, a photographer himself, thought the pictures deserved better. Tally spent three years scanning the negatives, frame by frame, and the three of them sorted the photographs into chapters together.

It was slow work, and the pictures came out of slow work too. In the early 80s a camera had no screen on the back. You bracketed your exposures to be safe, carried the rolls home, left them at a studio and waited a day or two to see what you had.

He turned professional in 1981, at thirty, with a simple manual camera and a zoom lens his parents gave him, and added better equipment one lens at a time as the work came in. Freelance assignments from aid organisations sent him into almost every corner of the country.

Going back through the photographs surprised him more than anyone. The India in them, he says, has gone.