In order to know and understand the world of Akshay Dutta, it is imperative to comprehend the complex social and cultural milieu that he inhabited. Many and various discourses had come together in an uneasy confluence to delineate both the quotidian and the intellectual lives of Calcutta in the nineteenth century. As David Kopf writes:

To attempt to write about Akshay Dutta's milieu is to first try and understand, at least in a broad and general way, some of the major strands of intellectual influence that marked the mind of the thinking person in nineteenth-century Calcutta. Between the beginning and the middle of the century, Calcutta had culturally and intellectually become almost as busy as London with the proliferation of printing and publishing establishments, the abundance of western scientific, philosophical, and literary matter, public libraries, English and vernacular newspapers, and cultural, literary, and social associations of various nature and inclination. Contained within the colonial logic itself was a culture of debate and discussion that involved both the ruler and the ruled in a way that was curiously set aside from the general narrative of colonial administration and its major decision-making processes. This is not to say, however, that these debates and discussions had little or no impact on the administrative policies of the colony. The mechanism of colonization was in many ways a symbiotic process, an ‘intercivilizational encounter’, as Kopf would put it. Therefore, there would be frequent interfaces, subtle adjustments, and careful tweaking of policy decisions keeping in mind the cultural, educational, and religious preferences of the native subject, so that the larger structure of colonial governance could remain intact. With the proliferation of printing presses, the increased circulation of newspapers, the general spread of enlightenment education beginning with the primary school, and the coming together of many and different ideological paradigms, the bhadralok class of the city was suitably busy forming and disseminating opinions about every matter of lived experience.