A dress can be one of the most useful garments in an Indian wardrobe and still be treated as somehow outside Indian dressing.
That assumption depends on silhouette doing too much of the cultural work.
Indian-ness does not begin at the neckline
Clothing can carry place and culture through material, hand process, colour, construction, proportion and the way a surface is handled. None of those require a garment to reproduce a traditional silhouette.
A Silk Chanderi column dress with hand embroidery can be as materially rooted in India as a more recognisable festive form. The language simply sits elsewhere.
Proportion changes the reading
Length, shoulder, volume and the balance between body and cloth affect how a dress feels. A straight column, a wider kaftan, a directional hem or a cropped layer over a long base each create different relationships to the body.
Those relationships can draw from Indian ways of dressing without copying them literally.
The question becomes more useful in a wardrobe
Many women now move between traditional and contemporary clothing without seeing those wardrobes as opposites. A dress may be worn to a wedding dinner. A sari may appear at work. A kurta may be paired with trousers that have no traditional reference at all.
The modern Indian wardrobe is already hybrid in use. Design should be able to acknowledge that reality.
Identity can be carried rather than displayed
A dress becomes Indian when its decisions belong here: the material, the hand, the memory, the proportion, the climate, the body and the life it is expected to enter.
That gives us a wider vocabulary for Indian dressing, and a more useful one.