He, along with his older brother Clemens Palme Dutt, was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Dutt was educated at the Perse School, Cambridge and Balliol College, Oxford[6] where he obtained a first-class degree in Classics, after being suspended for a time because of his activities as a conscientious objector in World War I, during which his writing was deemed subversive propaganda.

[8] Dutt first visited the Soviet Union in 1923, where he attended deliberations of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) relating to the British movement.

Following an illness in 1925 which forced him to stand down as editor of Workers' Weekly, Dutt spent several years in Belgium and Sweden as a representative of the Comintern.

According to the historian Geoff Andrews, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was still paying the CPGB around £15,000 a year "for pensions" into the 1970s, recipients of which "included Rajani Palme Dutt".

During this visit he also met several important leaders of India including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Vallabhbhai Patel, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Stafford Cripps.

[14] [15] His visit had such a profound effect upon Indian Communists that when they established the headquarters of their “People’s Publishing House (PPH)” in Jhandewalan, Delhi, between 1956 and 1958[16][17] they named the building the “R.

[18] On that building's second floor stairwell hung a portrait of RPD taken during his 1946 visit to India, remaining there until very recently and now possibly hanging in the Party's headquarters at Ajoy Bhawan.