These interpretations of the Vedas seem like the work of the Hindus of the 19th and 20th centuries who were shocked by their perceived backwardness in regards to the colonizing European, and sought to "reconstruct" the Vedas and make them more appealing to the European as well as the Europeanized pseudo-Dharmic. These same Hindus, for example, are ashamed of the intense erotic depictions found in much Indic art and architecture, and the uncomfortably frank and explicit (from their point of view) descriptions of sexual activity found in much Indic literature. Raja Ravi Varma was one such Hindu who was unduly influenced by the European, and who sought to reconcile Hindu mythology with the moral standards and expectations of Victorian Britain. In regards to the Vedas, these Hindus suddenly became painfully aware of the inherent meaninglessness of the Vedas as they came under the scrutiny of the self-proclaimed "Indologists", and so sought to construct new interpretations that would impress the European and Europeanized Hindu alike (it didn't help that many Westerners themselves actually bought the faux profundity of the Vedas championed by the pseudo-Dharmics). The brahmans could no longer expect the populace to buy the giant lie of the Vedas as they had for the past several millennia, and so it became imperative to give new meaning to these supposedly sacred texts, where no meaning existed before. I am, of course, referring primarily to the Arya Samaj movement, for they represented the epitome of the new Europeanized Hinduism. The famed Dayanand Saraswati rejected the classical commentaries on the Vedas as "corruptions", and tried to reduce the Ashwamedha to a purely abstract, allegorical ritual, despite the considerable detail in which the ritual is physically described in other Hindu works (including the depiction of women engaging in sexual activity with the horse). The pertinent question, of course, is whether or not Dayanand Saraswati would have championed such a radical re-interpretation of the Vedic corpus, if he wasn't living in the late 19th century India during the so-called "Hindu Renaissance" under the intellectual and moral shadow of the West in general, and the British Empire in particular?