People of the epic · Mahabharata questions
Is Ashwatthama still alive?
In the epic, Krishna curses Ashwatthama to wander for three thousand years with a festering wound and no human company, so within the story he does not die. Reports of sightings at forts and temples are folklore, not text, and there is no evidence for them.
Ashwatthama is the son of Drona, born with a jewel set in his forehead that protected him from hunger, thirst and fatigue. After his father is killed on the fifteenth day by a half-truth about his own name, Ashwatthama loses all restraint. On the night after the last day of the war he enters the sleeping Pandava camp with Kripa and Kritavarma and kills Dhrishtadyumna, Shikhandi and the five sons of Draupadi in their beds, then burns the camp. It is the single worst act in the epic, and it destroys the victory the Pandavas had just won.
Pursued the next day, he releases a brahmastra at the Pandavas; Arjuna answers with his own, and the sages force both to withdraw. Ashwatthama cannot recall his, and redirects it instead into the womb of Uttara, Abhimanyu widow, to end the Kuru line. Krishna revives the child, who is born as Parikshit, and pronounces the curse: Ashwatthama will wander the earth for three thousand years, alone, shunned, his wound running with blood and pus, carrying the smell of it, with no one to speak to. The jewel is taken from his head.
So in the narrative he is deathless in the harshest available sense. He is one of the figures traditionally listed as chiranjivi, long-lived ones, alongside Hanuman, Parashurama, Vyasa, Vibhishana, Kripa and Bali.
The rest is folklore and should be labelled as such. Stories circulate about a tall figure with a hollow in his forehead seen near the fort at Asirgarh in Madhya Pradesh, or bathing in the Narmada, or appearing in villages asking for oil. They are a living oral tradition, sometimes recent, and they are not in the Mahabharata and not attested by anything outside belief.