His father Roy Bahadur Bhutnath De was a government official in Raipur, Central Provinces (now Chhattisgarh), where the family of young Narendranath Dutta (future Swami Vivekananda) also stayed in the same building, briefly from 1877 to 1879.

[4][5] He attended Raipur High School, and went to study at Presidency College, Kolkata (then in the University of Calcutta), followed by Christ's College, Cambridge[5] A polyglot and linguistic prodigy, he was expert in 34 languages, including many eastern and western languages such as Chinese, Tibetan, Pali, Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, English, Greek, Latin,[6][7] out of which he was M.A in 14.

Then he translated Rihla, the travelogue written by Ibn Battuta and Jalaluddin Abu Zafar Muhammad's book Al-fakhri to English.

[11] The most important works of him included an English–Persian lexicon, translation of a part of Rig Veda with original slokas, editing of Lankabatar Sutra, Nirbanbyakhya Shastram, etc.

[11] His works, 88 volumes on literature, linguistics and Hinduism, are now part of the National Library of India, known as the Harinath Dey Collection.