# Kotia to Ketaki: At Home Away from Home

- Link: https://writersworkshopindia.com/2025/09/10/kotia-to-ketaki-at-home-away-from-home/
- Published: 2025-09-10T21:13:27+00:00
- Author: shuktara

5/5 - (2 votes)

**Authors:** Ketaki Sarkar and Chandana Dey[⌊A sample cover of the book: ochre coloured handloom sari with gold embossed nameplate and lettering for the title and author's name. The border of the sari lines the right hand margin of the cover.⌉](https://writersworkshopindia.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Kotia-to-Ketaki.jpeg)
**
Pages:** 186 **Year of Publication:** 2025 **Price:** ₹800 / $20 (USD) **ISBN:**
978-81-985733-0-8 (9788198573308)

_**About the Authors**_
 Russian by birth, **Ketaki Sarkar** (1907-98) met and married
Nitai Sarkar (1905-61) in Switzerland, following which both came to India in 1934.
Ketaki taught French at the Alliance Française and Ramakrishna Mission in Calcutta,
worked in the Government School (now College) of Art and made products for the Bengal
Home Industries emporium.

**Chandana Dey**, granddaughter of Ketaki, was born in 1959 in Calcutta. She studied
in New Delhi and Washington, D. C., and speaks Bengali, English and French. She 
has worked in the field of publishing and is currently with an NGO in Santiniketan.
She lives now in her grandmother’s house there. This is her first book.

_**About the Book**_
 After Ketaki Sarkar had retired (around 1970), her children
urged her to write about her life as an archive of family history primarily for 
her children and grandchildren. She completed her memoir, entitled “My Life” in 
1982. In her preface to the book, Chandana Dey writes:

‘”My Life” traces her life from 1907 to 1946, or till just before India’s Independence.
This is the story of a Russian woman who lived through the Russian Revolution, Famine
and the Civil War, and whose family finally took refuge, first in Lithuania, and
then Switzerland. After marriage to my grandfather, she left her family in Europe
and made a new life in India. Calcutta would become home and where she would become
a teacher of spoken French in the Alliance Française, while Nitai practised medicine.
Kotia always wore a sari, spoke Bengali and was completely immersed in her surroundings.
Santiniketan would become an integral part of their lives and she would live here
in sylvan surroundings in the family home named “Akanda” (the Bengali name of the
large shrub _Calotropis gigantea_) that she built and added to over the years, with
her own earnings and savings.

**_Kotia to Ketaki: At Home Away from Home _**is in two parts: the first is my grandmother’s
memoir, entitled “My Life”. The second is the historical background. I begin this
account in the 1850s and take it up to the Second World War. I became interested
in the Jonas family antecedents and found historical material on the Russian-Jewish
bourgeoisie of the mid-nineteenth century. I have attempted to write a micro-history,
taking up particular aspects mentioned in the memoir and expanding on the history
of the period. When I first read the memoir, soon after it was written, I felt a
historical backdrop was needed for readers to appreciate the life and times of the
Jonas and Sarkar families. The photographs in the book are from family archives.’

An interview with the author can be read [here](https://www.jayabhattacharjirose.com/interview-with-historian-and-editor-chandana-dey/).

_**Contents**_
 _Preface_ by Chandana Dey / 9 _My Life_ by Ketaki Sarkar / 13

Early Years in Europe / 14

Introduction to India / 48

The War Years / 62

_Illustrations _/ 69

_Afterword_ by Chandana Dey / 77

The Origins of the Jonas Family / 78

Creation of a Russian Intelligentsia (1880-1900) / 83

Moscow and Switzerland in Kotia’s Childhood / 98

World War I and the Long Road to Revolution / 104

The Russian Civil War (1917-20) / 112

Egalitarian Living: _Kommuna_ or _Obschina_ (1921-22) / 119

The Swiss Years (1922-34) / 124

Journey from West to East: Marseille to Calcutta / 133

Calcutta / 136

Santiniketan / 149

Calcutta under Siege: War, Famine and Riots / 167

The Jonas Family on the Eve of World War II / 172

Epilogue / 176

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