Buldeo is a male adult human who is often portrayed as a villain.
Biography[]
Soon after Mowgli left the jungle and was adopted by Meshua and Meshua'a family, he encountered Buldeo, the elderly (or at least middle-aged) chief hunter of Meshua's village. Buldeo was boastful and arrogant, and was furious when Mowgli, who knew what the jungle was really like, contradicted some of Buldeo's more fanciful stories about the jungle.
Buldeo hoped to catch the lame tiger (Shere Khan) so that he can claim the reward for the tiger's skin, but Mowgli (with the help of his wolf friends) killed the tiger first and refused to hand over the skin because he had vowed to lay it upon the wolfpack's Council Rock. When Buldeo threatened Mowgli, the wolf Akela intervened to stop him. Mowgli let Buldeo go, hoping that the matter would be settled, but instead Buldeo roused the village against him, claiming that Mowgli was a shapeshifting sorcerer. When Mowgli returned to the village the villagers drive him out; Buldeo tried to shoot Mowgli but missed.
Mowgli then rescued his animals allies and organised a series of animal stampedes, destroying the village and forcing the villagers, presumably including Buldeo as a "real devil", to seek refuge elsewhere.
Use by another author[]
Maxim Antinori's novelette Hunting Mowgli (2001) (ISBN 1-931319-49-9) centres around a meeting between Mowgli and Buldeo, but Antinori's Buldeo is a much younger and more intelligent man, so that the conflict between him and Mowgli is much more evenly matched and he actually succeeds in killing one of Mowgli's animal friends. Antinori's story is much darker in tone than Kipling's, and despite borrowing the basic concept and names has no continuity with the original stories.
He was also originally going to be in the Disney version of The Jungle Book, and can be heard in a cut song ("The Mighty Hunters") on the DVD, singing a duet with Shere Kahn.
Appears in[]
- The Jungle Book Shōnen Mowgli
- The Jungle Book (1967) (deleted)
- Adventures of Mowgli (deleted)
- The Jungle Book (1942 film)
- The Jungle Book (1994 movie)
- The Second Jungle Book: Mowgli and Baloo
- Jungle Book (Jetlag Productions)
- The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story (Cameo)