<that would imply a primary course of comparative-historical linguistics, not studied in India at all>
Comparative-historical linguistics of IE or Dravidian or any other?
'Not studied' means .not researched' / 'contributions are not made to'/ 'no original research done' ?
or
Not taught as a course in the universities?
In either sense the impression is a mistaken one:
Comparative historical linguistics is taught rigorously in huge amounts in all the linguistics courses in all the Indian Universities. I studied it at Osmania University, Hyderabad and at the University of Hyderabad. IE part with Prof. H S Ananthanarayana, Dravidian part with Prof. B. Ramakrishna Reddy. and at University of Hyderabad I studied the Dravidian side with Prof. P. Ramanarasimham.
Coming to research and contributions: It is well known that significant contributions to Dravidian family side of comparative-historical linguistics were made by many Indian scholars like Prof. Bh Krishnamurti.
Those who in India apprehend that IE historical linguistics is responsible for AIT theory, may not be from the academics of linguistics. My teachers always asked us to be cautious about drawing hasty physical anthropological or archaeological correlations to what they taught us in the historical linguistics course. Prof. Ramakrishna Reddy even told me that quite often, such correlations may not exist too. My IE course teacher used to say that it is not the job of a historical linguist to explain the wide geographical distribution of languages of a family.
--
Prof.Nagaraj Paturi
Hyderabad-500044