It is generally accepted that the dissemination of Hindu-Buddhist beliefs and ritual practises in first millennium Southeast Asia were largely the result of initiatives of local rulers to recruit Brahman priests and Buddhist monks able to secure their political and personal welfare. Yet it remains equally selfevident that the medium of transmission of both an awareness of Indian culture, and of its agents and propagators, were the merchant vessels which linked the Indian Ocean diaspora. It follows that a study of early traces of Indian merchant activity in the region should provide clues to the early entry of Indic religious systems into the emerging states and kingdoms of Southeast Asia.

The legacy of these early contacts and engagements are indicated by the scattering of Indic script stone stele inscriptions, both royal and mercantile, and by the regional distribution of the earliest Indic religious imagery, imported and locally produced. The vast majority of the inscriptions identify the patron, usually a local ruler who had assumed the trappings of Hindu culture, often including obeisance to Shiva or Vishnu and a Sanskritised honorific title and name-form. Religious imagery is, after the inscriptions, our single most important source of knowledge of the religious allegiances assumed by these rulers and has, through the study of style and iconography, the potential to clarify the regional origins of the propagators from the subcontinent (Figs. 11.1 and 11.2).

One of the earliest examples of a local ruler with clear Hindu religious affiliations is known from the Purnavarman inscription. This rock-cut inscription was located in a river-bed at Ciaruteun, near Bogor, West Java, and dedicated by a local ruler titled Purnavarman, who declared himself as the famous king of Tarumanagara [kingdom] and a devotee of Vishnu, and represented himself by a pair of footprints (pada), the same device used to evoke a divine presence (Fig. 11.3). This Sanskrit inscription is written in a cursive Tamil Grantha script in a style associated with the period, c. 450. The ruler, presumed to be local, has adopted an Indic name-form, and consistent with most ruler-names appearing in Sanskrit inscriptions of this early period, has the south Indian word-ending ‘varman’, a convention associated with the Pallava-clan of Tamil Nadu.