ABSTRACT
Arati Rao's evocation of the complex politics of gender and religion in India might serve as a paradigmatic case study for larger problems of the relation between religion and human rights, on the one hand, and women and human rights, on the other. Rao's analysis suggests how central religion is to the issue of women's human rights and how central an understanding of women's human rights is to an understanding of the relation between religion and human rights. One of Professor Rao's central points is that a conception of human rights working in conjunction with religious law need not treat religion's tenets as eternal and unchanging. If Arati Rao recognizes the danger in the argument about the power of women as agents of culture, she also recognizes implicitly that the claim for secularism as a ground for freedom from religion-based subordination of women may be illusory.
