“Kotia to Ketaki: At Home Away from Home” by Ketaki Sarkar and Chandana Dey
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, Ketaki’s granddaughter, 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 first took refuge in Lithuania and then Switzerland. After marriage to my grandfather, she left her family in Europe and made a new life in India. Calcutta [as it was known then] would become home and where she would become a teacher of spoken French in the Alliance Française, while Nitai [her husband] 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 Kotia Jonas or Ketaki Sarkar’s memoir, entitled My Life. The second is the historical background. Chandana Dey begins this account in the 1850s and took it up to the Second World War. She became interested in the Jonas family antecedents and found historical material on the Russian-Jewish bourgeoisie of the mid-nineteenth century. Chandana adds, that she “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.”
The extract that has been published on Moneycontrol is taken from Ketaki’s My Life. It is an account of her witnessing the 1917 Russian Revolution and then experiencing the aftermath, the new government, living with the communist principles, including living in a commune.
Ketaki Sarkar was born Kotia Jonas to a middle-class family in Moscow in 1907. She lived through the Russian Revolution, Famine and the Civil War. The family moved to Switzerland in 1921. Kotya met her husband, Nitai De Sarkar, a medical student. They married in 1930 and came to India in 1934. Kotia learnt Bengali, always wore a sari and made India her home. On one of their visits to Santiniketan, Rabindranath Tagore bestowed the name, Ketaki, on Katia Jonas. This is the name she retained for the rest of her life. Ketaki made Santiniketan her home and died at the age of ninety-one.
Chandana Dey studied Modern Indian History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi and
International Affairs at the School of International Studies (SAIS), Washington D.C. She has
worked in an NGO for over 25 years. She lives in Santiniketan, in her grandmother’s home, ‘Akanda’. She speaks Bengali, English and French. This is her first book.
7 Nov 2025
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