HOPE Strings ETERNAL.

At Gandhi Ashram Elementary School, children from some of India's poorest Himalayan villages have been given the gift of music--and a lot more.

They live in cramped mud slab houses without running water or electricity. Most cannot afford a pair of shoes. Until a few years ago, these children ate little more than a bowl of rice each day, had no hopes for the future, and had no idea what a violin was. Today, however, these 6- to 12-year-olds who come from some of India's poorest Himalayan villages make up the classical violin orchestra at Gandhi Ashram Elementary School. And they are known for giving spellbinding performances.

One of the children's most significant performances was at Calcutta's prestigious Saturday Club--hundreds of miles away from their home in Kalimpong, a northeastern Indian town near Nepal. As the ragtag orchestra played, an aristocratic crowd became true believers of what Jesuit Father Edward McGuire had been preaching for years: that music can be a weapon to fight poverty and illiteracy.

"Violin strings are the bootstraps that will pull these kids up," says McGuire, the Canadian founder of Gandhi Ashram."This was the first time such a crowd had seen for themselves how playing music can empower even poor children intellectually and emotionally."

McGuire opened Gandhi Ashram, a place that integrates rigorous violin instruction with an equally demanding academic curriculum, in 1993. In the first years, he recruited only 23 students. One of them was 8-year-old Sunita. Before enrolling in the ashram, Sunita spent her days toiling at another family's farm. Like her parents, she was illiterate and on the verge of malnutrition. But after a year at the school, she could read and write not only in her native Nepali but a bit in Hindi and English also. And she plays the violin with a determination and dignity that defies her frail body.

"I can't exactly say why, but everything is so different now because of my violin," Sunita explains. "Playing the violin makes me feel so good." As she meticulously places the instrument under her chin, her music seems even more extraordinary coming from a child who lives with her parents and younger siblings in a two-room mud hut.

"I've watched Sunita grow through her music," says head violin instructor Rudi Mani. "As she became more self-assured with her violin, not only did her studies improve, but she interacted more with other children."

McGuire hopes that as stories like Sunita's spread beyond Kalimpong--an area known for its lavish Buddhist monasteries and Darjeeling tea plantations --his music theory will become a model for educators around the world. Indeed, more affluent Western schools, many of which have discontinued music instruction as frivolous, could learn a thing or two from Gandhi Ashram.

Unlike India's public schools, which children cannot attend unless their families can afford school supplies and a uniform, Gandhi Ashram is free. With only $20,000 a year, raised mostly from individual donations from Switzerland, Germany, and Canada, the ashram employs five highly qualified teachers and provides each student with the use of a violin, all school supplies, and two meals a day.

Mealtime is a highlight of the school day for students, who before attending Gandhi Ashram couldn't fathom eating so well. McGuire believes that providing students with these meals is as essential as providing them with pencils for homework.

"If children are hungry, how can they be expected to concentrate on anything but filling their bellies?" he asks, adding that without these meals, many of them would suffer from malnutrition.

McGuire first came up with his music theory back in 1980, while working with demographically similar children at St. Robert's School in nearby Darjeeling. "I brought over Jogen Kahn, the conductor of the Calcutta Symphony, to give the students some culture," McGuire says. "After watching them sit in perfect silence, I realized the remarkable effect music had on children."

After that, McGuire hired a violin teacher and bought eight violins. Within three weeks of picking up violins for the first time, the St. Robert's students were playing classical music--and performing better in their studies.

Teachers at the ashram find the same results. "I was stunned by the students' learning curve. They were playing music that in England is given to much older students," says British music instructor William Morris, a volunteer. He, like everyone affiliated with the ashram, believes it is a place like no other.

One only needs to enter the school auditorium to see why. Waves of children rush in, heading straight to the cupboard to grab a violin. A large group of children takes its place on stage to practice a concerto; others retreat to far corners of the room to practice individually. All at once, a magical cacophony fills the room, resonating hopes for the future.

The school has acquired a reputation for academic excellence, prompting even the affluent to try and enroll their children in the ashram.

"If a kid doesn't have a protruding belly, sallow cheeks, a dirty neck, and no shoes, he is not considered for enrollment," McGuire says, adding that due to classroom overcrowding and a limited budget, enrollment is limited to only the poorest of the poor.

McGuire hopes to expand the curriculum to include courses such as computer studies to better prepare the children for future jobs. He is well aware that not every child will master the violin, and among those who do, only a few will be able to make a living at it. The playing field, after all, is never even, McGuire admits. But unlike other children in the Kalimpong area, the ashram's graduates will grow up to be more sophisticated and better able to cope with the world.

"My goal is to find the natural ability in each child and encourage that ability to develop," McGuire says.

No matter what becomes of these children--whether they go on to higher education or return to work in their villages--classical music will have given them a dramatically different perspective on the world and themselves. It has opened their eyes to new ideas, so when they close them, they no longer dream of a hopeless future.

BARBARA GROVER is a freelance photojournalist who lives in Los Angeles.