[3][4] Akhtar Husain was born in the district of Raipur[5] in the British Indian Empire, now within the state of Chhattisgarh, Republic of India.
[1] As a child, Akhtar became fond of reading and saved money to buy books in Hindi (a major register of Hindustani written in the Devanagari script), but could not read Urdu (another major register of Hindustani written in the Perso-Arabic script) as fluently.
[7] Husain moved to Calcutta to pursue advanced studies which at the time was also a major center for publication in Bengali, Hindi and Urdu.
But after leaving there in 1932, Husain went on to translate popular works from Bengali poet Qazi Nazrul Islam into Urdu.
[1] By 1935, Husain married Hamida, daughter of police officer and crime fiction novelist Zafar Omar.
[1] Upon this, Haq stopped all his works in Hindi, including the development of the English-Hindi dictionary, and Husain left Aurangabad for Delhi where he had difficulty settling for a career as a result of his application being rejected.
[1] He then applied to Sorbonne where he pursued a PhD in ancient life in the Indian subcontinent based on Sanskrit texts.