After the war · Mahabharata questions
Who was Parikshit?
Parikshit was the son of Abhimanyu and Uttara, born after the war and revived by Krishna when Ashwatthama weapon struck him in the womb. He was the only surviving heir of the Kuru line and became king when the Pandavas departed. His son Janamejaya first heard the epic recited.
With Abhimanyu and Draupadi five sons dead, the Kuru dynasty hung on one unborn child. Ashwatthama, pursued after the night raid, directed a brahmastra at the wombs of the Pandava women to end the line. The child was stillborn, and Krishna revived him, promising that he would live and rule. The name Parikshit is explained as the one who was tested, or who searched, because he was examined in the womb by the weapon and because, the epic says, he went looking for the one who had saved him.
He was crowned while still a boy when the Pandavas left for the mountains, with Kripa as his teacher and guardian, and the tradition remembers his reign as a just one. Later Puranic literature, especially the Bhagavata Purana, builds a whole frame around his death: cursed by a sage son to die of snakebite within seven days for an insult to a meditating hermit, he spent those days listening to the recital of the Bhagavata and was then killed by the serpent Takshaka.
His son Janamejaya responded by holding the sarpa satra, a sacrifice intended to destroy all snakes, which the young brahmin Astika stopped before it could finish. It is at that sacrifice that Vyasa pupil Vaishampayana recites the Mahabharata to Janamejaya, which is the frame in which the whole epic reaches us.
Parikshit matters for a second reason. The Puranic king lists continue from him through a succession of Kuru rulers to dynasties that are historically attested, which is why he is the hinge on which most traditional chronologies of the epic turn.