“He’s a new version of the classic entertainer — he can rap and dance, he can act great and be funny,” said the comic Hari Kondabolu, an old friend.

Mr. Ambudkar has been onstage since a wrist injury in high school derailed him from playing basketball. He grew up outside Baltimore, where his parents, both research biochemists at the National Institutes of Health, emigrated from India in the 1980s.

He took to hip-hop early, soaking up A Tribe Called Quest and Snoop Doggy Dogg . And after white children called him a racist epithet, he was embraced by the black children in his neighborhood: “They’re, like, ‘Where you from?’ I’m, like, ‘India.’ They’re, like, ‘We don’t know where the [expletive] that is, but he just called you the N-word so you’re with us.’”

He also struggled with how to express his heritage. “I went through a phase in high school to make people like me, where I would call myself — because of the ‘Simpsons’ stuff — I would call myself, like, ‘Slurpee Boy,’” he said, referring to the animated series’s character Apu, who has been criticized as a mocking caricature. “I stereotyped myself.”

In college, where his occasional dorm-room freestyle partner was the actor and musician Donald Glover, he made his passion for rap part of his studies. “Utkarsh was definitely one of the most experienced and had done the most amount of work already in terms of identifying himself within the performance elements of hip-hop culture,” recalled his hip-hop theater professor, Daniel Banks, who credited Mr. Ambudkar for providing part of the inspiration to create a course in live hip-hop performance for the theater studies program.

After graduation, however, apart from his work with Freestyle Love Supreme, Mr. Ambudkar was largely coasting. “It just sort of didn’t happen for me in the supernova way that I had assumed it would, based on how easily it had come to me,” he said.