Political History Of Ancient India

SR No.: 032292
Original Sutra Author: N/A
Author: Hemchandra Raychaudhari
Publisher: University of Calcutta
Publication Year: 1950
Total Pages: 714
Language: English
Classification: Book_English
File Size: 17 MB

Page 48

IDENTITY OF PARIKSHIT
19 with identical names, the heroes of tales of a similar character. The probability is that there was really only one Parikshit in the Kuru royal family, father of the patron of both Tura and Indrota.
Did he flourish before or after the Bhārata War ?. The necessity felt for offering an explanation of the name Parikshit given to Abhimanyu's son, at the end of the Bhārata War, and the explanation itself, probably suggest that the tradition of an earlier Kuru king with the name of Parikshit had not yet come into existence when the tenth book of the Mahābhārata was written." Parikshit I was possibly invented by genealogists to account for such anachronisms as the mention of IndrotaPārikshita-samvāda as an old story by Bhishma in the twelfth book (chapter 151). The wide divergence of opinion in regard to the name of the father of the so-called Parikshit I, and his position in the list, is also to be noted in this connection. It shows the absence of a clear tradition. On the other hand there is absolute unanimity in regard to the parentage and dynastic position of the so-called Parikshit II.2
1 Mbh, X. 16, 3.
"While the Kuru line will become extinct (parikshineshu Kurushu): a son will be born to you ( = Uttarā, wife of Abhimanyu). The child will, for that reason, be named Parikshit."
2 The identification of the Vedic Parikshit with the son of Abhimanyu who flourished after the Bhārata War does not seem probable to Dr, N. Dutt, the author of The Aryanisation of India, pp. 50 ff., because, in the first place, it goes against the findings of Macdonell, Keith and Pargiter who prefer to identify the Vedic Parikshit with an ancestor of the Pāņdus. As to this it may be pointed out that the existence of a Parikshit (father of Janamejaya) before the Pāņdus, rests mainly on the testimony of those very genealogies which are regarded by Keith as worthless and unreliable (cf. RPVU 21, 618). That the name of Janamejaya in this connection is an intrusion into the genealogical texts is evident from its omission from Chapter 95 of the Mahābhārata, the Java text, the Chellur grant. etc.
Dr. Dutt next argues that the Vishnu Purāna makes the four brothers Janamejaya, Śrutasena, etc., sons of Parikshit I. If he had only perused a subsequent passage (IV. 21. 1.) he would have seen that the Purana makes the