Authors: Ketaki Sarkar and Chandana Dey
 Pages: 186
 Year of Publication: 2025
 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.’
 
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