How to shade a transitive dependency in Gradle?

Yes, you can use the shadow plugin for Gradle to which has a very similar syntax to your example:

// Configuring Filtering for RelocationshadowJar {   relocate('junit.textui', 'a') {       exclude 'junit.textui.TestRunner'   }   relocate('junit.framework', 'b') {       include 'junit.framework.Test*'   }}

Apologies if I've misunderstood your situation and it is in fact more complex but it looks like the exclusion can just be provided in the dependency declaration?

dependencies {    ...    compile('org.apache.hadoop:hadoop-aws:2.7.1') {        exclude group: 'com.amazonaws', module: 'aws-java-sdk'    }    ...}

You can try the resolutionStrategy (https://docs.gradle.org/current/dsl/org.gradle.api.artifacts.ResolutionStrategy.html) to force a particular version.

Example from a projet:

configurations {    testImplementation.extendsFrom compileOnly    all {        resolutionStrategy {            // Force jackson 2.4.4 for Spark            force 'com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-core:2.4.4', 'com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-databind:2.4.4', 'com.fasterxml.jackson.core:jackson-annotations:2.4.4'            force 'com.google.guava:guava:23.6-jre'        }    }}