Inbam (Kural book)


The Book of Inbam, in full Iṉbattuppāl, or in a more sanskritized term Kāmattuppāl, also known as the Book of Love, the Third Book or Book Three in translated versions, is the third of the three books or parts of the Kural literature, authored by the ancient Indian philosopher Valluvar. Written in High Tamil distich form, it has 25 chapters each containing 10 kurals or couplets, making a total of 250 couplets all dealing with human love. The term inbam or kamam, which means 'pleasure', correlates with the third of the four ancient Indian values of dharma, artha, kama and moksha. However, unlike Kamasutra, which deals with different methods of lovemaking, the Book of Inbam expounds the virtues and emotions involved in conjugal love between a man and a woman, or virtues of an individual within the walls of intimacy, keeping aṟam or dharma as the base.

Etymology

Inbam is the Tamil word that corresponds to the Sanskrit term 'kama', and pāl refers to 'division'. It is one of the four mutually non-exclusive aims of human life in the Indian philosophy called the Puruṣārthas, the other three being aṟam, poruḷ, and veedu. The concept of inbam is found in some of the earliest known verses in the Vedas, Upanishads, and epics such as the Mahabaratha. Although inbam sometimes connotes sexual desire and longing in contemporary literature, the concept more broadly refers to any desire, wish, passion, longing, pleasure of the senses, the aesthetic enjoyment of life, affection, or love, with or without sexual connotations. The term also refers to any sensory enjoyment, emotional attraction and aesthetic pleasure such as from arts, dance, music, painting, sculpture and nature. Inbam in its sanskritized form kama is common to all Indian languages.
Inbam is considered an essential and healthy goal of human life when pursued without sacrificing the other three goals of aram or dharma, poruḷ or artha and veedu or moksha.
In spite of the Tamil term inbam referring to pleasure, Valluvar preferred to call the book Kāmattuppāl rather than Inbattuppāl in line with the trivarga of the Puruṣārtha.

The book and its chapters

The Book of Inbam talks about the emotions gone through by a man and a woman when they fall in love with each other. It covers the emotions of love both in the pre-marital and the post-marital states. With 25 chapters, the Book of Inbam is the smallest of the three books of the Kural text.
;Book Three—Book of Love
As with Books I and II of the Kural text, the author did not group the chapters under any subdivisions. However, the ten medieval commentators, who were the first to write commentaries about the Tirukkural, divided the Book of Inbam variously between two and three portions. For example, while Parimelalhagar's division consists of two parts, other medieval scholiasts have divided the Book of Inbam into three portions. Parimelalhagar's two-part division includes Kalavu and Karpu. However, Manakkudavar goes to the extent of dividing the book into five: Kurinji, Mullai, Marudham, Neidhal, and Paalai, in accord with the Sangam practice that divides the land into said five divisions. Kaalingar and Mosikeeranar divide Book III into three parts: masculine sayings, feminine sayings, and common sayings. While some of the medieval commentators consider couplets 6, 7, 9, and 10 of Chapter 115 as feminine sayings, Kaalingar considers these as masculine ones and goes on to elaborate accordingly. Pari Perumal divides Book III into three, likening it to the Kamasutra text. However, modern scholars such as M. V. Aravindan oppose this idea of comparing Kural's Book III with Kamasutra.

Poetic aspects

It is generally accepted by scholars that of all the three books of the Kural, the Book of Inbam is where the poetic genius of Valluvar attains its greatest height. This is possibly because the traditions of early classical literature of the Sangam poetry continue to remain strong in the domain of "pleasure." According to T. P. Meenakshisundaram, every couplet of the Book of Inbam may be considered a "dramatic monologue of the agam variety." According to Czech Indologist Kamil Zvelebil, true poetry in the Tirukkural appears in the Book of Inbam, where "the teacher, the preacher in Valluvar has stepped aside, and Valluvar speaks here almost the language of the superb love-poetry of the classical age":

Comparison with other ancient texts

The subject of pleasure that the Book of Inbam deals with is often compared by scholars chiefly with the Kamasutra. However, the Kural's approach of the subject differs entirely from the Kamasutra, which is all about eros and techniques of sexual fulfillment. With a virtuous attitude, the Book of Inbam remains unique as a poetic appreciation of flowering human love as explicated by the Sangam period's concept of intimacy, known as agam in the Tamil literary tradition. In the words of Zvelebil, while Kamasutra and all later Sanskrit erotology are sastras, that is, objective and scientific analyses of sex, the Book of Inbam is "a poetic picture of eros, of ideal love, of its dramatic situations." The Kural differs from every other work in that it follows ethics, surprisingly a divine one, even in its Book of Love. According to Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the Book of Inbam helps date the Kural literature since it "describes the hero as a one-woman man and concubines are absent. This is in conformity with Valluvar's views on personal morality."
While the work of Confucius shares many of its philosophies with the first two books of the Kural text, the subject of conjugal love expounded by the Book of Inbam is entirely absent in the work of Confucius.

Translations

Of the three books of the Kural, the Book of Inbam has the least number of translations available. The chief reason behind this was that many translators, particularly non-Indian translators, had long mistook the content of the book for something similar to Vatsyayana's Kamasutra and considered it inappropriate to translate after studying the two previous Kural books on virtue and polity. Many of the early European translators, including Constantius Joseph Beschi, Francis Whyte Ellis, William Henry Drew, and Edward Jewitt Robinson had this misconception. For instance, Drew remarked, "The third part could not be read with impunity by the purest mind, nor translated into any European language without exposing the translator of it to infamy." Later Western translators such as Satguru Sivaya Subramuniya Swami, too, avoided translating Book Three of the Kural.
Nevertheless, several later scholars of the nineteenth century realized that the Book of Inbam is only a poetic expression of the emotions involved in conjugal human love and started translating it too. For example, Pandurang Sadashiv Sane, a twentieth-century Marathi translator of the Kural, said, "The translation of this book is available in Hindi with the name of 'Tamil Veda', but it includes only two sections: 'Dharma' and 'Artha'. The third section discussing 'Kama' has been dropped. Actually in this section there is nothing which can be said to be obscene or vulgar. It is a very fine section. I have translated that section in full."

Citations

Primary sources (Tamil)