Buldeo

Buldeo, also known as Toomai is a fictional character appearing in Rudyard Kipling's Mowgli stories " 'Tiger! Tiger!' " (in "The Jungle Book") and "Letting In the Jungle" (in "The Second Jungle Book"). A different version of the character was later used by Maxim Antinori in "Hunting Mowgli" (2001). The name is from the Hindi or Sanskrit "Baladeva", which means "powerful lord".

Soon after Mowgli leaves the jungle and is adopted by Messua and Messua's husband, he encounters Buldeo, the elderly (or at least middle-aged) chief hunter of Messua's village. Buldeo is boastful and arrogant, and is furious when Mowgli, who knows what the jungle is really like, contradicts some of Buldeo's more fanciful stories about the jungle.

Buldeo hopes 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) kills the tiger first and refuses to hand over the skin because he has vowed to lay it upon the wolfpack's Council Rock. When Buldeo threatens Mowgli, the wolf Akela intervenes to stop him. Mowgli lets Buldeo go, hoping that the matter will be settled, but instead Buldeo rouses the village against him, claiming that Mowgli is a shapeshifting sorcerer. When Mowgli returns to the village the villagers drive him out; Buldeo tries to shoot Mowgli but misses.

Buldeo then persuades the villagers that Messua and her husband should be tortured and executed for harbouring a "devil child" and sets out to hunt Mowgli. Mowgli is able to evade him easily, and orders his wolf-brothers to harry Buldeo to exhaustion.

Mowgli then rescues his adopted parents and organises a series of animal stampedes, destroying the village and forcing the villagers, presumably including Buldeo, 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.