"In the eighteenth century a gentleman could go to a formal dinner comfortably dressed in jacket, waistcoat and trousers made of white or buff-coloured cotton. In the early nineteenth century, however, he was expected to arrive for diner in a formal black coat. Then a faintly ridiculous ritual would be enacted, where the host or hostess would invite him to swap his heavy black coat for a lighter one. This he would accept, and he would then go out to the verandah where his bearer would be waiting with the lighter jacket, having been instructed to bring it along in anticipation of this very invitation.

Later in the century things became even more formal, with men having to dress in complete black woolen dinner suits as they did in Britain in the depth of winter. Even white cotton trousers became the exception rather than the rule. As C.P.A. Oman, author of Eastwards, or Realities of Indian Life commented in 1864, some men in Calcutta became used to this and did not seem to feel the heat, but "to see, however, some stout Colonel from the north-west provinces, or a robust individual fresh from home under the ordeal is painfully ridiculous." Right up until the First World War men would appear at dinner parties in boiled white shirts, white waistcoats, black or white ties, and tail coats or dinner jackets."

From The Raj at the Table: A Culinary History of the British in India, by David Burton. London: Faber and Faber, 1993. See especially p. 28.