Jahan's political, literary, and medical careers often intersected as she pursued wide-ranging feminist and socialist agendas in the 1930s. Jahan "offered women’s healthcare in lower caste and class communities, educated women in reproductive health and marriage rape in sweepers colonies, held adult education classes, ran her own gynecological medical practice, participated in trade union rallies and protest marches, [...] and authored and orchestrated political street theater." Jahan's younger sister, Begum Khurshid Mirza, writes that Jahan "worked day and night, and most of her earnings went to the party fund," from which she and her husband received a small sustenance allowance. Mirza further relates that Jahan became a sort of mother-figure for all the poor comrades and their families. According to Salman Haidar, Jahan's nephew and former Foreign Secretary of India, Jahan was so extensively involved with Communist organizing that she was regularly followed by plainclothes policemen. Jahan's organizing activities continued until March 1949, when she was jailed for three months for participating in a strike that paralyzed the United Provinces railway system. Jahan was released in May 1949 after participating in a hunger strike with her fellow prisoners, but cancer caused Jahan's health to deteriorate by early 1950 and made Jahan unable to continue her lifelong activist projects.