He was involved in running the printing press of the Serampore Mission that his father had helped establish in India and used his linguistic skills in translating several works into the Bengali language including an attempted encyclopaedia on science.

His mother Dorothy Plackett (d. 1807) suffered from mental health problems and Carey was sent to India where he was taken care of by William Ward and baptized alongside Krishna Pal the first Hindu to be converted by the Serampore mission.

While travelling from Rangoon to Ava in 1814, his wife (née Blackwell) and two children were drowned in a shipwreck during the end of August in the Irrawady River and the printing press was lost.

[1] Carey was made Royal physician (and titled as Raja Sippey) and also acted as an interpreter to the King but got caught up in the political troubles between British India and the Burmese Kingdom.

He began to work on a Bengali encyclopedia, Vidyaharabali, translated from the fifth edition of Encyclopædia Britannica and produced in parts.

[4] He also produced a Bengali translation of Goldsmith's history of England (Britts desiya bibaran samuccay).