A Buddhist votive tablet
C. O. Blagden’s short note describes a fragmentary clay tablet bearing a 10th-century Nagari inscription, discovered by H. Vaughan Stevens in a cave in Kedah and now held in the Singapore Museum (p. 205).
Blagden reports that Professor Kern of Leyden, examining a photograph of the tablet, identified the script as Nagari of approximately the 10th century and recognised parts of the well-known Buddhist formula ye dharmā hetu prabhavā at the top, though he was unable to decipher the whole (p. 205). Blagden contrasts this tablet’s Northern Indian script with other Kedah and Province Wellesley inscriptions in a South Indian alphabet, which Kern had dated to c. 400 A.D., and concludes that both Northern and Southern India contributed to the civilisation of the Malayan regions (p. 205). He further argues that the Peninsular inscriptions, though few, refute Hugh Clifford’s claim that Hindu influence did not extend to the Peninsula, and that Indian influence was the most potent force in the civilisation of the Javanese and Malays (p. 206).