Voices of Change Progressive Poetry and Cultural Resistance in India

Akshaya Kumar is Professor at Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh. India. Having more than three decades of post-graduate teaching and research experience, his widespread literary and critical scholarship extends to the fields of Comparative Indian literature, Translation Studies, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies. He has extensively published in journals like South Asian Review, Indian Literature, Translation Today, and Biblio. Major books to his credit include, Poetry, Politics and Culture: Indian Texts and Contexts (Routledge: Delhi, New York and London, 2009). and A.K. Ramanujan: In Profile and Fragment (Rawat: Delhi and Jaipur, 2004). His co-edited volumes include Cultural Studies in India: Essays on History, Politics & Literature (Routledge: New Delhi, New York and London, 2016), Dialogues Across Languages: Theory & Practice of Translation in India (Panjab University Publication Bureau: Chandigarh, 2016). Translated text to his credit include, Gau-Dhuli Vela: Punjabi Translations of Sudeep Sen’s English Poems (Autumn Press, Patiala, 2021). He is at present writing A Critical History of Punjabi Literature to be published by Orient Blackswan.

Amandeep Kaur is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar. She earned her doctoral thesis (2018) from the Department of English and Cultural Studies, Panjab University Chandigarh, India mapping the growth of modern Indian poetry from its progressive phase during and after the colonial period, identifying its transformational propensities with a focus on its representation of resistance through the matrices of caste, class and gender in the post-progressive phase. She has also published two papers titled “Alienation of the Other: Examining Marginal Narratives in Select Punjabi Films” and “Kisan Protests in Punjab 1907–2021: A Literary Lineage of Resistance” in The Routledge Companion to Caste and Cinema in India and Agrarian Reform and Farmer Resistance in Punjab respectively in 2023. She is currently working on the dialectics of folk and ideology in Kirti Kaav.