To use JOINs (left, inner), document says that it is mandatory to have proper associations in HBM files, like <many-to-one>, <one-to-one> etc.
Assuming we are talking about Hibernate here, their documentation does not say it is mandatory to map associations in the mapping files.
Lets say I want to keep HBMs independent, i.e., I don't want to define any association. Is it still possible to write HQLs wherein I map 2-3 tables, may be using inner/outer join, to retrieve results or I should use SQL in that case?
I can't think of a reason why you would want to do this (especially as queries written in HQL will largely ignore the association mapping in favour of an explicit join) - what is it you are trying to achieve? But yes, you can map the foreign key as an property rather than an association.