Education
De studied at Canning College, Lucknow, and later travelled to England, where he was called to the Bar by the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple.
De studied at Canning College, Lucknow, and later travelled to England, where he was called to the Bar by the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple.
He was also admitted to Saint Mary Hall, Oxford, where he spent one year on a Boden Sanskrit Scholarship. He then joined the International Correspondence Schools , of which he was one of the earliest Indian entrants. He was assistant magistrate and collector of Shahabad, Bengal in 1881.
He served as the district magistrate and collector of Khulna.
He became the magistrate and collector of Balasore in Orissa and then of Malda and Hooghly. He was an acting commissioner of the Burdwan Division.
While the district officer of Hooghly, he started the Duke Club there which was meant to be exclusively for Indians. One of his Commissioners once told him not to entertain the thought of wanting to join a British club in the district.
After retirement he translated and edited, in two volumes, Nizamuddin Ahmad"s Tabaqat-i-Akbari.
The third volume, which he had left fully prepared, was published posthumously. He was a vice president of the Council of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. In 2001, approximately 2,000 photographs of himself and his family members were given in loan to the photographic archives of the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
Later, the archive was shifted to the newly established Jadunath Sarkar Centre for Historical Research, CSSSC, Calcutta, and the photographs too were deposited at "Jadunath Bhavan", where the new Centre is located.
He was also appointed as a member of the Calcutta Improvement Trust.