Tagore is one of the Nobel laureates I've included in the reading for this class. That has some significance because it means that he was honored outside of Asia for his work during his lifetime, both officially and unofficially. As communication and transportation technologies expanded, more people in general learned more about what other people in the world were up to. In literature, 20th century writers began to have broader exposure to a worldwide audience than ever would have been conceivable to 18th and 19th century writers. Tagore himself was widely traveled, having lived in England and having lectured extensively in the US and abroad.
Today we don't think about communication and transportation technologies as barriers; we may assume that good writers around the world will be discovered, perhaps internationally recognized, based on the merit of their writing. We have structures in place to ensure that this happens, e..g, the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and Nobel Prize for Literature. In reality, we're not quite there. We're getting closer, but there is still undiscovered territory out there - as recently as five years ago, a professor told me that she's still bringing back suitcases of new novels, titles that she simply can't get here, from South America when she returns home to visit.
Tagore's stories provide a nice combination of weird and wonderful, real and surreal. According to eNotes.com:
“The modern short story is Rabindranath Tagore's gift to Indian culture,” observed Vishwanath S. Naravane in 1977. Of Tagore's two hundred short stories, Naravane asserted, “about twenty are pearls of the purist variety.” Many of Tagore's short stories became available in English after he had gained international acclaim as the Nobel Prize-winning poet of Gitanjali. Early reviewers in English received Tagore's stories with mixed appraisal; while some applauded his short fiction, others found them of negligible quality. Later critics have commented that these early reviewers were ignorant of the context of Indian culture in which the stories are set. Commentators have praised Tagore for his blending of poetic lyricism with social realism, as well as the way in which his unearthly tales maintain psychological realism within an atmosphere of supernatural occurrences. Scholars frequently praise Tagore's short stories for the deeply human quality of the characters and relationships. Mohinder Kaur commented of Tagore, “With an infinite sympathy and rare psychological insight, he works out the emotional possibilities of different human relations.” For example, B. C. Chakravorty says of “The Postmaster,” counted among Tagore's finest short stories, “The story by itself is hopelessly uninteresting. But it acquires immense interest on account of the passages of lyrical grandeur which give a poetic expression to the feelings of the orphan girl and those of the postmaster.” (http://www.enotes.com/short-story-criticism/tagore-rabindranath)
Wikipedia's article on Tagore provides a wealth of additional reading suggestions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagore