The six- to twelve-year-olds from India's poor Himalayan villages who attend the Jesuits' Gandhi Ashram learn music and academics in equal measure. The results have been amazing.

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 idea what a violin was, and had no hopes for the future. Today, however, these six- to twelve-year-olds who come from some of India's poorest Himalayan villages make up the classical violin orchestra at the Jesuits' Gandhi Ashram school. And they are known for giving spellbinding performances.

The most significant performance the children have given so far took place last year before the German ambassador to India at Calcutta's prestigious Saturday Club-hundreds of miles from their home in Kalimpong, a northeastern Indian town near Nepal. As the ragtag orchestra played, the aristocratic crowd became true believers of what Jesuit Fr. 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 Elementary School, a place that integrates rigorous violin instruction with an equally demanding academic curriculum, in 1993. He had entered the Society in 1949, spending his novitiate years in Guelph, Ontario. In 1954, a regent at the time, he traveled to Darjeeling, India, and has spent the majority of his many years in India in the field of education. He did serve as assistant to the novice master for a brief time, but in 1993 his provincial asked him to open Gandhi Ashram.

In the first year, he recruited only 23 students. One of them was eight-year-old Sunita. There is no better example than she of what McGuire is trying to accomplish with his school.

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 just in her native Nepali but a bit in Hindi and English as well.

And she can play the violin with a determination and dignity that defies her frail body.

"My goal is to find the natural ability in each child and encourage that ability to develop," says Canadian Jesuit Fr. Edward McGuire, who founded the ashram ("house of learning" in Hindi) in 1993 in northern India.

"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 beautiful music seems even more extraordinary coming from a child who lives with her parents and younger brother and sister in a two-room mud hut.

"I have 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 previously known only 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 family can afford school supplies and a uniform, the ashram is free. With only $20,000 a year, raised mostly from individual donations from Switzerland and Canada, the ashram ("house of learning" in Hindi) 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 still a highlight of the school day for these children, who before enrolling in Gandhi Ashram couldn't fathom eating such wholesome, plentiful meals. 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 belly?" McGuire says, adding that without these meals, many of these children 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 at St. Robert's some culture," McGuire says. "After watching them sit in perfect silence, I realized the remarkable effect music had on children."

After that day, McGuire hired a violin teacher and bought eight violins from Braganza and Company, a classical music store in Calcutta. 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 students much older," says British music instructor William Morris, who volunteered at the ashram last year. "It was amazing how children who never played keyboard learned to play classical compositions," Morris adds, recalling that with electricity scarce in the area, the only way to get the keyboard to work is by running it on a car battery. Morris, 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 hope for the future.

Gandhi Ashram students are serious-about their music and their studies. The school provides them with instruments, books, supplies, and two meals a day. Chronic malnutrition is a threat in this area; for many students these meals are their sole source of sustenance.

The school also has a reputation for academic excellence. Even the affluent, who could afford any school in the area, are trying to 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 must be 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 ashram's students 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, he is convinced that 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.

Freelance photojournalist Barbara Grover has traveled to the Himalayas, Zanzibar, and the Mosquito Coast, among many other points on the compass. Her most recent photo essay took her to the barrios of San Salvador and Los Angeles, where she documented a group of former gang members who wage war on violence rather than each other.