Just for reference as it was something I was looking for, you can test for presence within the values or the index by appending the ".values" method, e.g.
g in df.<your selected field>.values
g in df.index.values
I find that adding the ".values" to get a simple list or ndarray out makes exist or "in" checks run more smoothly with the other python tools. Just thought I'd toss that out there for people.