Contrary to various popular depictions, contemporary South Asia is neither an anachronistic eco-utopia nor an irredeemable wasteland. Rather—as in other parts of the Global South—its sizeable, numerous, and heterogeneous oppressed populations are reckoning with the region’s colonial, imperial, and neo-colonial histories in its neoliberal present, often articulating ingenious and audacious alternatives to this status quo even as they contend with the rising tides of capitalist exploitation, dispossession, and displacement, Hindu fundamentalism, state repression, and heteropatriarchal domination. This course offers a historical and theoretical framework for understanding and addressing the complex political ecology of modern South Asia, with a particular focus on India. To achieve this overarching goal, this course foregrounds South Asia’s deeply entrenched caste hierarchy, the impacts of British colonialism on land distribution and usage, the shortcomings of postcolonial nation-building, neoliberalism as a vehicle for neo-imperialism and neocolonialism, and the dynamics of bottom-up mobilization against all of these oppressive forces at various points in time. This course draws upon vital works of theoretical and empirical scholarship in the intersecting fields of South Asian studies, critical political ecology, critical political economy, Indigenous studies, peasant studies, and subaltern, postcolonial, and decolonial studies. It also foregrounds equally vital public statements, reports, commentaries, documentaries, and other materials and interventions put forward by prominent South Asian social movements, front line communities and community organizations, and other grassroots actors. The interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives furnished by the materials for this course will paint a dynamic picture of contestation not only over land per se, but also over the very conception of land and the relationship that human beings should have with it.