Mundhra with Aishwarya Rai for the promotion of Provoked at Cannes in 2006

London, Sept. 4: Film director Jagmohan Mundhra, who died today in a Mumbai hospital from a reported heart attack and internal bleeding, kept reinventing himself to try and shed “the sultan of sex” tag that had clung to him since his early days in Los Angeles.

Mundhra, 62, directed over 30 movies but he left behind two unfulfilled ambitions.

One was to make a film on Sonia Gandhi. He met her, got a few helpful tips from her and showed her the script but finally did not get the green light. “It’s the story of a woman who came to India for the love of a man but stayed on for the love of a country,” Mundhra, known to all as “Jag”, was fond of saying.

The other was to return to Calcutta, the beloved city of his childhood, and make a film in praise of Bengali women, “possibly an erotic thriller”. “Calcutta is very special to me,” he confided during a chat with The Telegraph. “I am especially partial to Bengali women,” he said, remembering how they combed their long hair on rooftops and balconies. “They have very nice, big eyes, they have nice, luscious hair.”

After his parents moved to Bombay, Jag stayed on with his grandparents in their Burrabazar home. His strict grandmother banned him from going to the cinemas, but he acquired boyhood ambitions of becoming a filmmaker “after running away from a cricket match in Victoria Garden, going to Dharmatala Street and seeing Guru Dutt’s Kaagaz Ke Phool at the Orient”.

Circumstances took him a long way from his moorings. He was born in a middle-class family in Nagpur on October 29, 1948, and moved to Calcutta where his father settled after setting up a plastics factory. In Bombay, he studied electrical engineering at the IIT from 1963-68, then went to the US first to do his MBA at Michigan and then a PhD on marketing in motion pictures, before settling in Los Angeles and directing several “adult entertainment” films.

Jag earned the nickname “sultan of sex” after making such films as Night Eyes, Ladies Game, LA Goddess, Sexual Malice, Improper Conduct and Perfumed Garden. He later said proudly: “Night Eyes did 40 times its investment — $750,000 budget and $30 million business…. I did not have to look for work after that.”

But a radical change came in 2000 with Bawandar, a film on the rape of a village woman in Rajasthan.

Jag moved to London for five years in 2004, where he continued to make films with a social message, such as Provoked, the story of the battered Indian housewife Kiranjit Ahluwalia, and Shoot on Sight, inspired by the London suicide bombings of 2005.

Three years ago, he moved to Mumbai to make comedies like Naughty@40 and Kissa Kutte Ka.

“I did a deliberate reinventing of my career. I realised that even though I had done so many films, the media, especially the Indian media, was undermining the quality of my work because of the subject matter of (my earlier) films….”

About Calcutta, he said: “To me, the proudest moment in my life was being invited to the Calcutta Film Festival at Nandan in 2001 as a delegate from the US for the screening of Bawandar. Having grown up in what now seems a Marwari ghetto, here I was, going through Chittaranjan Avenue, escorted by police as a VIP. I could not believe it.

“The first thing I do when I land in Calcutta is I go to Dhakuria Lake and have this big jhhal muri. The taste is from my childhood. I want to go to New Market, have fuchkas — all that stuff which reminds me of the aspirations of my youth.”

Jag is survived by wife Chandra, to whom he was married for 39 years, and daughter, Smriti, 30.