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 (dharma), poruḷ (artha), and veedu (moksha).
[12][13][14] The term also refers to any sensory enjoyment, emotional attraction and aesthetic pleasure such as from arts, dance, music, painting, sculpture and nature.
[6][10][17][18] 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.
[26] This is possibly because the traditions of early classical literature of the Sangam poetry continue to remain strong in the domain of "pleasure."
"[28] 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":[29] In the words of Pattu M. Bhoopathi, "[i]t is not the word, or the phrase or the meter that essentially contributes to the grandeur of the presentation of the situational sequence but the echoed voice, the mood and the articulation that suggestively individuates the situational element of the love or the lover in each of the couplets.
"[33] He further states, "Here in Kamattupal Valluvar intuitively anticipates much earlier in time the Keats' concept of 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'.
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.
[2][20] 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.
[35] 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.
[41] Many of the early European translators, including Constantius Joseph Beschi, Francis Whyte Ellis, William Henry Drew, and Edward Jewitt Robinson had this misconception.
[43] 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.