I can't seem to find a getIndexes() command implemented as part of pymongo's Collection object - is that intentional? is it implemented somewhere else in the class hierarchy?
if it isn't, what's the pymongo canonical way for getting the same effect?
What you might be looking for is index_information()
at the Collection level. From the docs:
Get information on this collection’s indexes.
Returns a dictionary where the keys are index names (as returned by create_index()) and the values are dictionaries containing information about each index.
>>> db.test.index_information()
{u'_id_': {u'key': [(u'_id', 1)]},
u'x_1': {u'unique': True, u'key': [(u'x', 1)]}}