Would you consider eighteenth century in India an era of ‘Dark Age’, or a period of economic growth? Elucidate.

This is one of the liveliest debates in Indian historiography, and the answer depends on whether one measures the empire or the economy.

The case for a dark age. Jadunath Sarkar's account of anarchy after Aurangzeb, and the Aligarh school's analysis of the Mughal crisis — Irfan Habib's jagirdari crisis and agrarian revolt, Athar Ali's shortage of jagirs against an expanding nobility — describe a collapse of the central order. To this is added the invasion of Nadir Shah in 1739, the sack of Delhi, repeated Afghan incursions under Abdali, the wars of the Deccan, and the disruption of the Doab. Contemporary Persian chroniclers themselves write in the register of lament.

The revisionist case. From the 1980s a substantial body of work argued that political decentralisation is not the same as economic decline.

• Muzaffar Alam on Awadh and Punjab showed successor states with functioning revenue systems and rising local prosperity, in which the decline of Delhi meant the rise of Lucknow and Faizabad.
• C. A. Bayly, in Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, traced the growth of intermediate towns, merchant communities and service groups whose commercial networks survived and profited from political change.
• Banking and commerce expanded. The house of the Jagat Seths in Bengal, and comparable firms elsewhere, financed states and armies — the emergence of what Bayly and Subrahmanyam call portfolio capitalists.
• Regional states invested. Maratha, Hyderabadi, Bengali and Mysorean rulers built irrigation, patronised temples and towns, and competed to attract merchants.

The resolution.

• Distinguish the object. The Mughal empire declined; the Indian economy did not decline uniformly with it. Resources were redistributed from the centre to the regions.
• Distinguish region. The Doab, Rajasthan and the war corridors suffered severely; Bengal, Awadh, Hyderabad and the Maratha territories in western India saw growth for much of the century.
• Distinguish period. The most severe economic damage in Bengal follows the Company's assumption of the diwani in 1765 and the famine of 1770 — colonial, not Mughal, in origin.

Conclusion. The eighteenth century was not a dark age but a period of political fragmentation with uneven and in places substantial economic growth. The label of darkness owes much to a Delhi-centred view of Indian history and to colonial writers who needed the preceding century to look chaotic.