Uthappa, a member of India's 2004 Under-19 World Cup team, made his international debut in 2006 and played 46 ODIs and 13 T20Is, and was part of the team that lifted the inaugural T20 World Cup in 2007 in South Africa. He also won several domestic titles with Karnataka and won the IPL twice: with Kolkata Knight Riders in 2014 and with Chennai Super Kings in 2021.

Uthappa, now 36, started his domestic career in 2002-03 with Karnataka and ended it with Kerala in the truncated 2020-21 season. He also represented Saurashtra during the 2017-18 and 2018-19 seasons. He played 142 first-class matches, scoring 9446 runs with 22 centuries while averaging nearly 41, and scored another 6534 runs with 16 hundreds in 203 one-day games at an average of 35.31. In 291 T20 games, the last of which he played in the 2022 IPL for Super Kings, he scored 7272 runs while striking at 133.08.

He played all 15 seasons of the IPL and represented as many as six teams in the tournament: Super Kings, Knight Riders, Mumbai Indians, Pune Warriors India, Royal Challengers Bangalore and Rajasthan Royals. He amassed 4952 runs in 205 IPL games, striking at 130.35 and averaging 27.51.

Uthappa was known for his aggressive batting, which earned him an international debut in 2006, but he was dropped soon after the 2007 T20 World Cup because of poor form. The year before playing his last few matches for India in 2015, he achieved a rare treble with Karnataka, who won the Ranji Trophy, the Irani Cup and the Vijay Hazare Trophy in the 2013-14 season. He followed that up with a prolific IPL for Knight Riders in 2014, ending the season as the tournament's leading run-scorer with a tally of 660 runs at a strike rate of 138.

He was rewarded with a return to the Indian side for tours of Bangladesh and Zimbabwe in 2014 and 2015 but modest returns meant he was out again. In between, he led the run chart in the 2014-15 Ranji Trophy season as Karnataka became the first domestic team to repeat their title-winning treble.