‘Kotia to Ketaki’ is an unusual and  very readable book,  so much so that I finished it in one sitting. Unusual, since this is a two-part book, wherein a Russian grandmother’s manuscript completed in 1982 has been lucidly  stitched   into a larger historical context by her Indian granddaughter Chandana and lovingly published as  a slim book  in 2025. The distinctive hand-woven cover is a much sought after hallmark of the publisher and burnishes the content in an elegant manner.

Kotia Jonas, the grandmother, was born in 1907 in Moscow to  a Russian-Jewish family and lived through some of the most tectonic events of the 20th century. Born before World War I  began (1914), she witnessed the Russian revolution as a child and experienced the privations of that period. The family fled to Geneva where she met a young Indian medical student, Nitai De Sarkar, and they were married in 1930. Their daughter Maya (Chandana’s mother) was born a year later.

The young Sarkar couple moved to India in 1934 and lived in Calcutta initially. A visit to Santiniketan  and a meeting with Rabindranath  Tagore resulted in Kotia being bestowed with the name Ketaki by Gurudev and the transformation was complete. A Russian-Jewish bride internalized Santiniketan, the socio-cultural ethos of Bengal and the nationalist fervor that was then animating India.

With the onset of  war in Europe, Dr. Nitai  Sarkar joined the army and Ketaki, a young mother with two children  was witness to  the tumultuous events  of the 1940s  that included the Second World War that ended in 1945 and the blood-soaked  partition of the sub-continent in August 1947.

A personal trajectory that is book-ended by the 1917 Russian Revolution and  India attaining  independence 30 years later is a rare  experience and merits recounting.

The book is in two parts and as Chandana notes : “The first is Kotia Jonas or Ketaki Sarkar’s memoir, entitled ‘My Life’; and the second is the historical background.  I begin this account in the 1850s and take it up to the Second World War.”

After Ketaki retired (having taught French in Calcutta)  and moved to her home in Santiniketan in the 1970s,  her family prevailed upon  her to write her story, as it were – from the early years in Russia and Switzerland and the later journey to India. This memoir, titled ‘My Life’ was completed in 1982 and both Ketaki and her daughter Maya were keen that this be published in book form.

Chandana notes  in the preface,  that after reading the manuscript, she felt that a historical backdrop would be useful to contextualize a personal memoir and adds: “I have attempted to write a micro-history, taking up particular aspects mentioned in the memoir and expanding on the history of the period.”

It is a neat division and the first part of 70 pages is the Kotia-Ketaki memoir.  In the second section, Chandana picks up the narrative  and weaves the micro family history of the Jonas family with the macro events of the late 19th century and her grandmother's  journey that brought her to Santiniketan  in the 20th century.

The latter chapters include the emergence of a Russian intelligentsia in the late 19th century, the onset of World War I and the 1917 Russian Revolution. These macro punctuations are  spliced with the travails of the Jonas family and this segues quite seamlessly into the Kotia-Ketaki journey from Switzerland to Santiniketan, which closes  with  Calcutta during World War II, the Churchill driven famine that killed millions  and the 16 August  1946 Direct Action day. The very last chapter surveys the Jonas family on the eve of World War II and in a deft way, the family story  that begins in the run up to World War I is brought to closure.

The world as Kotia saw it is brought alive in a very personal manner and she writes of the Russian Revolution and her family : “After the War was over, Moscow had a spell of violence: the October Revolution (1917). The intelligentsia was of course jubilant and so were my parents. That was what they had lived for, worked for and waited for, for so long. Huge processions were passing in the streets with red banners. It seemed that the whole city was out on the streets, including my mother. We saw her from our balcony carrying a red flag and proudly waving at us. Father stayed with us at home. He was a theorist, not a man of processions. Soon, famine followed.”

This brief paragraph, written in an unpretentious and lucid manner is import-laden and the reader gets a glimpse of a very consequential historical event – the 1917 Russian revolution and Kotia filters those events through the family lens and captures the core personal traits of both parents in an affectionate yet insightful manner. In pithy strokes, the memoir captures large swathes of 20th century history in a charming fashion. 

Ketaki passed away in 1998 in when she was ninety-one and Chandana  writes of her grandmother: “She found her true home in Santiniketan …where she finally got that roof over her head that had been missing in her childhood….perhaps, when Kotia became Ketaki, she said ‘au revoir’ to her past and ‘salut’ to her present and future.”

The epilogue is a masterly summation of the warp and weft of 19th and 20th century history,  spanning three generations across three continents and the leavening of  diverse cultures and political ideologies,  framed against  the meta-narrative of imperialism, extractive colonialism and the birth of a new nation. Ketaki was witness to all of this and Chandana is to be commended for persevering with this 1982 manuscript and shaping it in this refined manner.

Kotia to Ketaki: At Home Away from Home ;  Ketaki Sarkar and Chandana Dey; Writers Workshop, Kolkata ; Pages: 186 ;  2025 ;  ₹800 ; Hardcover

(The reviewer is President, Society for Policy Studies  and an Indian Navy veteran. He can be reached at cudayb@gmail.com)